Wireless network connection with Vista

[Alison556]

My friend bought a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop running Vista. She's been trying to set up her wireless network connection but it just isn't happening.

The best she got on diagnostics was that the laptop to router connection was fine, but router to internet wasn't. To rule out an internet problem, we started up her old laptop and it connected to the internet just fine.

Did a bit of fiddling about (this was the first time I'd ever clapped eyes on Vista, so it was a learning curve) and couldn't get anywhere. One minute it would tell us that the connection was fine (though still not connecting to the internet) then it would tell us that there was a problem and to contact ISP (but we knew it wasn't the internet cos the other computer was connected at this point).

Then, we lost all network connections completely. When you asked it to find network connections, it came up saying there were none (and there should have been two - hers and her neighbours).

I noticed that "Network Discovery" was set to Off, but when I tried to activate it, it just sat there for about 10 minutes doing nothing and froze.

It's driving me nuts. I've never had anything to do with wireless networks or Vista before, but surely it shouldn't be that hard to set up?

Anybody got any ideas?

 

[Softus]

I'd start by establishing that you can make a wired connection from the new laptop to the router.

Then, with wireless, make sure (on the router) that you (or your friend) hasn't restricted wireless client connections by MAC address, and then, er, just connect up and away you go.

I've done it with Vista a handful of times, which isn't enough to have committed all the details to memory, but it wasn't hard, so if you work your way through the various network connection property dialogue boxes then you'll find the place where you declare to Vista that the 'new network' isn't the evil Skynet and thereby otherwise prone to take over the planet and festoon it with cyborgs.

Don't forget that every time you change a setting that Vista thinks could be a rogue attempt, you have to respond to yet another prompt and thus assure it that all the horrid monsters were only a nasty dream.
_______________

Vista: just say no.

 

[Alison556]

Thanks, I'll go and camp out at her house and try it again.

That was one thing I noticed that was reeeeealy irritating - Vista kept flashing up stupid boxes asking if I was really, really, really sure that I wanted to do something.

And all in the name of progress..................whatever happened to Windows 3.11?

 

[Deluks]

I had similar problems a few weeks ago with my mates machine. His Apple iBook worked fine with the 3Com wireless router, as it always has done, but when trying to connect with a new Vista laptop, there was no way in without disabling security on the router. There's a certain security encryption type that isn't available in Vista when setting up wireless connections.

aha, just found it:

here

 

[Softus]

There's a certain security encryption type that isn't available in Vista when setting up wireless connections.

I don't think that's true. Yesterday I connected a laptop running Vista using WPA-PSK / TKIP.

aha, just found it:

here

That was RC1.