[Kevin Sevcik]

I vote you're both wrong. I have a feeling that your Toshiba laptop has an extra helpful network setup utility. I don't have a Toshiba, so I can't tell you exactly what it is or how it's working, but I'll tell you about the super helpful utility on my Lenovo Thinkpad and you can extrapolate from there:

My Thinkpad comes with a utility called Access Connections. This is partly the wireless setup manager, but it really manages all network settings on my laptop. It has various location profiles for each wireless network I connect to, as well as for each wired network. In the advanced options for the location profiles, it has a setting for overriding my current TCP/IP setup. Typically this defaults to forcing DHCP, wiping out any static IP setup I've done in the normal fashion. You can set this override to give you a static IP address for that particular network if you want.

So the downside is if you don't know about it, it seems like your computer is actively working against you to annoy and frustrate you. On the plus side, once you know about it, it makes setting up your laptop for multiple teams and environments pretty easy. I have it set for a static IP when I'm on the robot's wireless and DHCP if I'm on my home network, etc.