Thetownend.com

Trying to sort a problem out for a friend and its beating me at the moment....

- Virgin broadband connection shared via Wifi.
- One laptop connects fine, with any type of encryption.
- The other laptop will only connect with no encryption or WEP, for all others it gets a 'limited connection'.
- The laptop that isn't working will connect to another Virgin Wifi network with a different encryption (not sure which).
- I've checked all the settings and they are fine / the same as the laptop that works.
- Laptops are running Vista.
- The wifi network card driver looks pretty up to date, though I do need to try the latest version.
- I've tried rebooting the router / modem.
- I couldn't see any anti-virus related issues (though I need to check this more, but it wouldn't fit with the other symptoms).
- The Virgin engineer who installed it couldn't figure it out either.

Anyone got any ideas?

Deffo sounds like an encryption problem, so first thing to do would be to connect it with ethernet and see if there are any driver updates available.

Turn off encryption - setup MAC address filtering - hide the network.

Using Windows to configure the wireless cards or a third party program?

The joys of Vista. My old man has been having fun and games for years, which i've posted about here. We never managed to get the laptops and desktop to stop losing connection or internet.

MAC filtering is an option but can easily be bypassed and makes allowing new devices a pain.

I was doing everything through Windows.

The router was seeing the laptop and assigning an IP address, tried some pings from the laptop but they were all failing.

First thing I always check, is if there is something else besides the standard windows firewall application running.

You could also try setting the lappies IP manually in the control panel-network connections-wireless adapter. I've known this to work for troublesome connections

Also try changing the wireless channnel

I think I remember doing something that solved the problem. Occassionally. That was to first check the mac addresses of the hardware in ipconfig, where for some reason they kept getting given a mac address of 00-00-00-00-00-00 and then go into windows and assign all the devices new mac addresses manuallly. I also manually gave all devices their own ip and assigned all the subnet bollocks as well.

It seemed to work, but hand on heart did it work? Fuck knows it's windows. My Dad had 3 brand new identical laptops at one point, yet all behaved differently on the network, all were using different amounts of ram and cpu and all took different times to start up and shit down. Go figure.

I think I'd rty a couple of things here.

- Firstly I'd turn off all encryption. You say that it works in this mode. Is that both laptops work OK when connected to the internet at the same time ? Then I'd try pinging the router and something on the internet so you know they should be pingable when you switch encryption back on!

If it works then you'd think that the DHCP, firewalls are OK.

- Then I'd probably run both using WEP. If that is OK then I'd probably go with that with SSID broadcast turned off as a temporary solution. Yes it can be cracked, but its fairly unlikely.

- Definitely update the drivers and firmware (if applicable) to the affected device

- Not got much Vista experience. But is there the same concept of either using "Windows Zero config" OR the devices dedicated driver like there is in XP? If you are using Windows Zero Config go for the device drivers dedicated driver instead and see if that works.

Other than that not much to try. I'd imagine the "limited connection" is probably encryption failing leading to  DHCP dying on its arse. You can check this by opening an I can't beleive it isn't DOS box and typing "ipconf", if the wireless adapter has no address or the wrong address (i.e. internal address and not on the same network as the router ) then its failed. You could allocate a static IP outside the DHCP address pool, also remember to configure the DNS addresses statically too. Then you can see if you can ping a device on the network (the other PC or the router) and ping something on the internet - If its an encryption failure then you won't be able to.

To be honest wireless can be a complete pain in the ass at times. I used to use WEP (Nintendo DS needed it) and certain manufacturers implemented how an ascii string was used to form a password differently from others, so I ended up having to use the ascii hex. This should not be a problem with WPA though.

I had another card that when first used only used to connect with any kind of encryption turned on if you connected first without encryption (presumably an ARP issue). Never did solve that so its in the bin.