A good suggestion if he hasn't tried it already and the problem's only been occuring for a few minutes - however the nature of the question leads me to believe this is a recurring problem not just an intermittent one!reset your wireless router and disable then re-enable your wireless adapter.
usually works for me if my connection is being 'reset' constantly.
As for pinging it from the command prompt, go to start => run, type in cmd, hit enter, then type
Code:
ping google.com