My computer is back online, no thanks to the Tech Support folks at the company that sold it to me. What went wrong was that I installed the latest updates they told me to install and buried in there was a new driver for my Ethernet connection and it caused things in that department to shut down. They were of no help but fortunately, I have a great guy-who-fixes-computers who only charged me a modest amount for digging around in my settings and undoing the upgrade.
As I said, I'll be making things up to you tomorrow.