I'm again trying to tap that vast resource, the FOF knowledge bank. Forgive me if this is a simple-minded question, this is not my area of any expertise at all.


I have a wireless network at home, which has worked fine for a long time. I have a laptop that I bring home from work sometimes, and its wireless card connects to the home metwork usually without incident.

Recently, I have had two occasions when the laptop, when set to "search for network," has been able to pick up a strong signal and my "network conections" indication is that I am connected. But, my various applications (both MSIE and Firefox browsers and email client) fail to recognize that I have any connection at all, and I get server failres when trying to go online.


This happened to me a week ago at a hotel (when there was a free-access server signal... after re-starting the browser several times, I suddenly got it to work) and now it's happening to me at home. I did just change some encryption settings on my network, which I dutifully changed on the laptop -- and which now indicates that it is receiving my home signal correctly. So, it appears that I'm getting the signal, but the applications are not recognizing it, for some reason.


Incidentally, if this is impoirtant, when I entered the encryption key onto the laptop setup, it required me to abridhe it to five characters (from ten). After I did so, it worked fine, but that seemed strange to me. I have not idea if that has any bearing on this issue.


Given that description, can anyone help? I'm trying to go out of town for a few days tomorrow, and having a connection with this laptop (both before and during travel) woudl be a great help.

When you are connected you should open up a DOS command window and type in ipconfig /all. This way you can verify you are pulling an IP address from your wireless router. Assuming you have an IP address (generally something along the lines of 192.168.1.X) then you should also see the IP address of the default gateway. In the command window see if you can ping that IP address. If you can then you are certainly connected and communicating with the touter properly.

If this is the case and you still can;t get to the internet it is most likely the DSL/Cable connection between you and your provider. Try power cycling the router. If you know how to access the web interface for your router you can also verify in there if you are connected to your provider.

Okay, I wil try that -- my cable conneciton is fine, as I am connected at the moment through another computer on the same network. Just the laptop is a problem right now.

So... uh... I open a DOS window (I think I can figure that much out) and I want to "ping that IP address." How do I do that? Is ping a DOS command that I just type in on a command line? Sorry... if I even knew what keywords to use, I'd be doing a web search rather than begging for freeloading help like this.

Okay, I wil try that -- my cable conneciton is fine, as I am connected at the moment through another computer on the same network. Just the laptop is a problem right now.

So... uh... I open a DOS window (I think I can figure that much out) and I want to "ping that IP address." How do I do that? Is ping a DOS command that I just type in on a command line? Sorry... if I even knew what keywords to use, I'd be doing a web search rather than begging for freeloading help like this.
To open a DOS command window just go to Start->Run and type in cmd and hit ok. From the prompt when you run the ipconfig command you should get something back that looks like this:

http://www.fof-ihof.com/upload/primelord/screen1.png

In this case to ping my default gateway you would just type ping 192.168.1.254

If it works you should get a response that looks like this:

http://www.fof-ihof.com/upload/primelord/screen2.png

If it comes back and says request timed out then you are not talking to the router. If when you run the ipconfig command if it has an IP address that starts with 169 and nothing for the default gateway then you are not pulling an IP from the router. You can try typing ipconfig /renew to try and pull an IP address.

Okay, I opened a DOS window, and pinged the address -- and it seems to have failed. Sent 4 packets, none got through.

I am connected on two other computers through the same network... if my encryption password were incorrect, would I still be showing a good connection on my "Network Connections" panel? I'm assuming not. *shurg*

Okay, I opened a DOS window, and pinged the address -- and it seems to have failed. Sent 4 packets, none got through.

I am connected on two other computers through the same network... if my encryption password were incorrect, would I still be showing a good connection on my "Network Connections" panel? I'm assuming not. *shurg*

Most likely not, but I don't know that for sure. You can try and rule out the encryption by disabling it and seeing if you can connect with no encryption. If you can then that would certainly suggest the encryption key is your issue.

Well, thanks for the help - it appears my laptop is perhaps amidst a broader meltdown, that may (or may not) be causing these problems. Right now, I'm getting all sorts of breakdowns on the screen (the display is freaking out) and I am restarting for the third time.

I guess I'll try to figure out what's up with that, but it's making my connection a pretty secondary issue, if it can't even sit stably on the desktop.

You'll be able to see signal strength without being connected, but if it says, "connected", you should be communicating with your router.

This might help you:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/wlan_client_configure.mspx?mfr=true

I have the same problem that I'm going to tackle tomorrow. Almost to the letter. The weird thing is that I can't connect my son's laptop even without encryption. His laptop is not getting an IP address. I believe the problem is with my router vice his laptop since I can't get my work laptop an IP address either. Excellent signal. Connects to the network. No IP address. I'm thinking it's something in my router settings that's preventing me from connecting his laptop.

The weird thing is that my son's Xbox connects fine.

You could also make sure in the control panel under administrative tools -=> services, that your Wireless Zero Configuration is started.

So, it seems I'm having a similar problem now, but with a desktop computer that was working fine up until about a week ago. It was happily connecting to our home network, and now it's giving a similar indication as the laptop was -- it's getting a (pretty strong) signal, but I am not connecting to the router or (apparentrly) pulling an IP address, whatever that means.

The ipconfig command got me next to nothing... and the ipconfig /renew yielded an error message "No operation canm be performed on Wireless network Connnection while it has its media disconnected."


I'm stumped, net searching hasn't yielded anything that seems right on point, and Mrs Q's level of patience is growing thin.

???

FWIW, I changed my channel from 11 to 6 and that got it going again. I'm guessing that there was something interfering (another network maybe since our laptop also detects that network) on that channel. A few days later I had the same problem and switched back to channel 11 and it's been working since. *knock on wood*

There are probably hundreds of different reasons for why things are on the fritz. I've had this before and I've had to shut down Zone Alarm (my firewall) in order to get access to IE/Firefox. Once I get through, I turn the firewall back on right away and it works fine. Kind of weird, but worth trying.

Also, sometimes if I have the XP firewall and the Zone Alarm firewall running at the same time, I have connection issues.

I'm not sure how it works here in Germany, but I'm not sure how the phone filters work (I tried to hook one up and couldn't get a connection), but when the phone rings here, I'm hosed and have to restart my router and modem. But once I do, everything comes back to life.

I don't know if any of these thoughts are useful, but I thought I'd throw them out there as personal fixes to similar problems.

Well, the mroe things change, the more they stay the same.

Admist frustration (this only being the latest) we broke down adn bought Mrs Q a fancy new iMac. Got it all set up. It's big. She's thrilled.

She was setting things up, and got to "connections." It sensed our network, we entered the encryption key... and no dice. Heh.

So, I tried turning encryption for our network off... and it seems to have connected just fine. Any guesses what's up with that?

What kind of encryption are you using? WEP 64 bit or 128 bit? WPA? I'm no expert, but I'd try scaling down to see if it makes a difference. If you're going WEP 128 bit, try going to 64 bit, etc.

Was the laptop set to the the same type of encryption (WEP, WPA, or something else) as your network?

I'l try scaling down... the weird thing is that her computer worked fine for a while, even with the current encryption. It apparently then shut down fairly recently, I don't knwo why. Dunno if that rules out the sort of thing you raise, but I'll try it anyway. Have little to lose, I guess.