He wants wireless and the ethernet cord in and active.
Why?!?

turn it on, the laptop tells me there is an ip conflict.
The message should also include the MAC address of the machine that conflicts..

As said by others, forget netbios/wins/dns.. The problem is IP based..

Forget DHCP either.. A DHCP server will never ever give out the same IP to different machines.. A DHCP server will also not issue an IP that's already in use (it pings the IP before giving it to a client)..