Wireless Connection Problems

Hi there,

I am not very hardware minded so you may have to bear with me here! You may also have to talk to me using very basic terms when replying!

We have an NTL cable modem, a Netgear WGR614-6VGUKS wireless router and a Sweex LW053 54mbps wireless LAN USB 2.0 adaptor.

We have 2 x Dell PCs (the one in question was purchased c. June 2005) and 1 x Samsung Netbook (all running XP). On Thursday morning all three were running fine, but by the afternoon our main desktop would not connect to the internet. Both the other PC and the Netbook are fine (thankfully).

The wireless network connection icon in the toolbar tray has a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark on it with the status: "limited or no connectivity" however the network seems to come and go (it also keeps trying to get onto my neighbours!?) and the signal strength says five bars.

When I click on view wireless networks it doesn't show any and instead gives me a great big spiel about how it cannot configure the wireless connection and tells me to start the WZC service. We have started this but we still get the same message.

When I try to repair the connection it gets so far and then says "cannot renew IP ".

I have tried the following:

• Rebooting (including switching everything off at the mains for an hour... just in case)
• Clicking on the "repair" button.
• Run a full scan (with AVG free and Spybot Search & Destroy)
• CMD ipconfig /release and /renew
• CMD netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt
• CMD netsh winsock reset catalog
• Running CCleaner (cleanup and registry)
• Connecting the PC and the wireless router manually via Ethernet cable (tried two to be on the safe side)
• Uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers for the Sweex adapter
• Reset the PC system updates to the settings on 25th June (someone else did this for us in safe mode... not totally sure what this entailed)

I have also had the blue screen of death probably more than 10 times now, which worries the hell out of me. This usually happens when I click on something (nothing specific) to do with the wireless connection (last time was when I tried to use the repair button). The numbers in the brackets seem to be ever changing, but the first number is always 0x0000008E

Example:
*** STOP: 0x0000008E (0xc00010003, 0xAD04FBA4, 0x00000000)

There have been a couple of side issues which may or may not be related but I will mention them just in case.

• When I plug in a USB drive to the PC in question it recognises the drive and I can access the info on it, however when I come to disconnect there is no icon in the system tray.
• When I tried to connect my NC10 to the router with the Ethernet cable I got the same yellow exclamation mark and "limited or no connectivity" message. This could be user error though as not sure whether I was meant to do anything more for it to work (reboot or whatever) so I literally just plugged it in and unplugged it again when it didn't work. Wireless still works fine.

So long as it connects to the internet I don't care whether it's wired or wireless (the router is, like, on the PC so it's really not necessary for it to be wireless).

Please help! I don't know what else to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Just let me know if you need any more information.

Thanks,

Wendy

 

Have you tried to set a static ip address on that problematic machine you have. Try to go to the working machine: Start Menu>Run> type "cmd" > Press Enter. On the Command Prompt window type "ipconfig/all" press enter.

Copy all the information, now go to the problematic machine, right click the icon that has an exclamation mark, select Status. Click on Properties button, Look for Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Select that and click on the Properties button.

Select both items that say "Use the... ". Now input all the information that you copied from the working machine EXCEPT the last octet of the IP address (normally it looks like this 192.168.1.xxx, do not copy the part with x). Replace the last part of that IP address with a .254 or any number not equal to 1, 255, or any of the numbers listed on both working machines. Click OK until you exit out of all windows.

By this time, you should be connected to the network but if not let us know.

 

Hiya,

Thanks so much for your help. My husband messed about with it last night and managed to somehow get it going again (I think he uninstalled and reinstalled everything wireless network related and re-entered all the passwords and codes and whatnot).

Though the connection now seems to be working the computer is still not right - presumably from the sheer volume of fatal errors it's gone through over the past few days. Now it's working again should all this be fixed or will whatever caused the BSOD still be messing about with it?

Thanks again for your help,

Wendy

 

Wireless security might have caused the problem connecting wirelessly but you also mentioned being wired and not working...nevertheless, it's good to know that it's working now.

As for the BSOD, most likely you'd have to observe until it reoccurs.

 

I haven't tried it again wired, to be fair. I'm scared to touch it now and sticking to the netbook!

Will monitor things and see whether we get any more BSODs. As I say, it still seems a bit funny, but hard to describe quite what I mean by that.

Thank you,

Wendy

 

What happened here was that the IP address of the problem computer was the same as another computer's on your home network. It started working again when your husband uninstalled and reinstalled the programs because the programs probably set an IP address statically, that is to say, an address that never changes.

If that happens again, review the IP address at all the computers either by viewing your router's webpage (which is done by typing the router's IP address into the url bar of your favorite web browser) or by typing ipconfig into the command prompts of all the computers attached to your network.

Cheers

 

BTW, your BSOD problem I found on Micro$oft's website. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945658/

And here's a link where you can download the newest driver for your network card: http://www.sweex.com/producten.php?sectie=&subsectie=&item=65&artikel=717&detail=d < just to save you some time =P >

 

Thanks for that - never occured to me that the IPs could be the same. Didn't even realise that could have an effect!

We looked for new drivers and couldn't find any which shows how dumb I am! And, ok, I'm gonna sound REALLY thick now, but where do I install the latest drivers to please?? /

My husband used the computer this morning and apparently it blue screened him on startup to say the hard drive was dirty and then spent 30mins or so presumably cleaning it up. Hopefully that will help with some issues too.

I've looked at the microsoft website and it seems I haven't got SP3 as yet (though could have sworn I downloaded it a couple of months ago). In light my problems do you advise I still download this or leave as is on SP2?

Thanks!

-Wendy