A "limited or no connectivity" that will NOT go away..

OKay check this out. Got ten new Fujitsu Lifebooks (very nice little notebook BTW). The last two we opened and set up did this... Both the RJ-45 and the wireless connection say "little or no connectivity." Both are armed with a Winders APIPA instead of the 10.147.blah from the DHCP. I tried the repairs at pchell, nothing. Went through a number of hoops with tech support, nothing. Used the restore cd twice, one from THE puter, one from a known working puter, nothing. They are fully connected at 1.0Gb and 54Mb w/excellent signal, and on the same drop as my main desktop with a Gb Cisco switch. Another identical puter works fine at the end of the same patch cable. I even took one of the non-working machines and went to the closet and plugged it directly into an open port on the front of one of the Cisco 3750s. Nada. Now, get ready to tighten your belt... On both if you assign static information in the TCP/IP settings, *poof* they work and you can surf. There is not DHCP trouble, these are the only two computers in the entire compound that do this. So do you call this a hardware problem or a Windoze problem?? Maybe it's a full moon problem???

 

Event log entries on the two PCs or the DHCP server that shed any light on the issue?

Almost gotta be a windows glitch (spyware?) but since they are new, how about a format & clean OS install?

Otherwise, you could try setting TCP/IP back to the factory defaults and see if that helps.

start->run->cmd and OK to open a cmd window
netsh int ip reset C:\resetlog.txt and ENTER

At worst you might get some additional information from the data in the c:\resetlog.txt file.

 

I don't have access to the DHCP, it's across town and to get soemone to look would be more trouble than getting them replaced hehe. They were fresh out of the box so no spyware, however I might mention even the tech at Fujitsu was surprised when I told him they all had the Google toobar pre installed. TCP/IP were at factory default, we never changed them only to the point of adding our wireless SSID to the list. I reinstalled from a recovery disk twice; two different disks. And as for the resetlog.txt, that was a new one for me but it was the first thing the Fujitsu tech had me do. Which made me rather impressed with their tech support staff after dealing with Dell, HP and AOL. It didn't work either, I did that, the three repair files and driver updates after the recovery and still nothing. The only way they will connect is with static info in the TCP/IP properties.

Now for the latest, I brought one of them home to see if it would connect to my home network and DING! it does. Both wired ant wireless grab a DHCP IP number right off the bat. Very, very strange considering they are the only 2 out of ten that did this and only two out of hundreds of other computers that do it.

 

That smells like you have some MAC addresses blocked (probably by the Cisco gear) although since the wired and wireless NICs have very different MACs, that would be really strange.

I tend to be pretty pragmatic and I think in this situation I would either
- return the devices and get new ones if possible or
- assign static IP values to the machines and exclude those addresses from your DHCP scope then try to not even wonder what was wrong

BTW - even a factory setup TCP/IP can be damaged and that particular netsh string will often set things right.

 

Well number 2 isn't a possibility since they will be going to different buildings all over town. They were bought direct from Fujitsu so they will be sending someone out to handle the repair/replcement. I guess we will file this under PFM way in the back of the cabinet....