If these laptops have two NIC devices, presumably one of them is the Wireless NIC. This will not work under DOS as DOS does not support wireless NIC devices - you need the full operating system to do this. Consequently, you could try the simple step of turning off the Wireless NIC in the bios and then see if you can get the single remaining ethernet NIC working.
HOWEVER, it is a fact that modern hardware has outgrown DOS. DOS does not support SATA hard disks which are standard nowadays, so you need to switch the hard disk emulation to the older ATA (IDE) standard otherwise DOS will not see your hard disk. Some bioses no longer provide this legacy support. Additionally, optical devices are predominantly SATA these days also, so the old DOS cdrom drivers no longer work either.
Consequently, you should consider switching to WinPE as your boot environment - and this can run from CD or DVD or any USB storage device such as a flash drive or external USB disk. The article at https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/readyadventures-winpe will get you started.
As you have Ghost 8.3, you will find that the DOS executable will run under WinPE and allow you to image hard disks. The great thing about WinPE is that you can add drivers for both NIC and SATA chipsets if the base WinPE release lacks the appropriate support.
Just one further thing you should be aware of.
Windows 7 consists of two partitions (in addition to any vendor maintenance partitions), and both are needed for Windows 7 to start correctly. Ghost 8.3 is unaware of the way the boot manager operates in Windows 7, so you will need to image the disk, rather than just a partition, so that the structures are maintained.