wireless networking help please (1 Viewer)

[Gregg Loewen]

Hi guys

I am getting tired of this problem that I am encountering and hoping that you all can offer some assistance.

I have a wireless router setup and it works quite well for my kids laptops and my spouses. However, when I come home from a business trip, or after my laptop has gone into standby mode, it will not reconnect to the network.

My laptop will find the network but will only connect with "limited or no connectivity". Even if I do a refresh or a disable and reaquire or use the repair command, it will not fix the problem. The only way I can seem to get back on to the network is to unplug my wireless router / cable modem which will do a full reset. then there are no problems connecting....however this is a real pain in the butt.

Please assist if you can.

thanks!!!

Gregg

 

[Paul_Sjordal]

Are you using a USB adapter? Have you tried just unplugging and replugging the dongle?

 

[Gregg Loewen]

no dongles....the wifi stuff is built in. I have tried to disable then to reconnect.

When I use the repair function...the pop up says "unable to renew IP address"

 

[David Norman]

Have you tried manually typing a renew command? My wife's laptop will do this occasionally (once a month maybe these days) and I'll have to unplug the router for a reset.

Sometimes typing ipconfig /renew on the "Run" line, but it doesn't always work for me.

 

[Robert_Gaither]

I had a similar problem with an older computer but it wasn't due to being wireless but a wired lan connection (telling it to "repair" or disable/enable wouldn't fix it most of the time). I installed an USB to lan adapter but while it was installing, I have no idea why, the other adapter (the one built into the computer mainboard) now will renew the ip address, gateway, dns, etc (it would originally show an ip address and gateway but these were way out of the range of what my router should assign). The irony is that if I connected the lan adapter directly to my cable modem it'd update the connection settings immediately which confused me even more. I'm going to advise to install another adapter (you might not have to use it) to see if this may fix it.

 

[Andrew Pratt]

What laptop and router do you have Gregg? Is the firmware on the router up to date?

 

[SethH]

I think Paul is probably right. I would change it to a static IP. You don't have to change all the IPs to static, you can just do yours. Do the following:

If your router is setup as 192.168.0.1 and it is set to give out DHCP addresses from 192.168.0.2-192.168.0.100 then set your static address somewhere OUTSIDE of that range (e.g. 192.168.0.101). This will prevent someone else from being given your IP address.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Sometimes it just isn't convenient to use a static IP. For instance, if you want to be able to use DHCP in other locations with the laptop, setting it to static at home quickly becomes a real pain.

A better approach would be to set a reservation in the DHCP server so that it always issues a specific IP to a specific MAC address. That way, the laptop would always get the same IP.

However, I believe the problem is at least partly due to whatever cheapo router is being used. They aren't exactly known for having good software internally, many of them do nutty stuff. That's why I retired my old D-link at home and put together a firewall out of an old Compaq small form factor desktop PC, two network cards and m0n0wall. Works like a charm.

 

[TimDoss]

You may also want to check your BIOS... mine has an option on whether or
not to reconnect to the network after resuming from standby.

Also, sometimes I will have a problem connecting that I can solve by running the command
services.msc and restarting "wireless zero configuration".

 

[Paul_Sjordal]

PS -- what's your signal strength like? That could affect things too.

 

[nolesrule]

The only time I have this problem is when I have a lot of wireless networks set up and the one it is trying to access is near the bottom of the list (I currently have 12). I found that changing the order solved the problem.

And I will agree with Kimmo's recomendation of IP reservations based on MAC address. That is definitely the way to go for notebook computers, rather than setting up a static IP. That's how I set up all the computers on my network. Unfortunately, not all routers support that, which is why I am still using my 8 year old SMC router with a separate wireless access point.

Or it could be the router and/or access point. Some are better than others