Vista and wireless network not working

Belnahua

Hi,

I am about to tear my hair out here with Vista. I've tried all the suggestions I can find, after trawling through tons of useless advice too!

Situation is this.

Friend's router packs up.
I replace with a brand new shiny one.

All 5 laptops (which are XP or 7) reconnect to the new router flawlessly.

The 6th laptop which is Vista Home Basic is sitting there saying it's an Unidentified Network and will only give 'local connection'

It's connected to the router, got the correctly issued DHCP IP address.

But I cannot change it from Unidentified Network/Public to a named Private so it can connect to the internet.

It can ping itself on 192.168.2.6, but cannot ping anything else.

If I plug in a wired cable, no problems, it tells me it's an Unidentified Network, which I change to Private and give it a name, then straight on the internet. Sorted.

Unplug the network cable, and it goes straight back to UN and cuts off the internet.

I've tried various fixes as suggested on forums, but to no avail.

What's more interesting is I cannot even change the name of "Unidentified Network" in the dialogue box for the wireless, but the wired one, lets me change it!

So anyone out their please had the same issue.

The laptop is an ACER (enet management turned off and letting windows handle the connections), the wireless card is an Atheros AR5007EG. Drivers and windows fully updated!

Thanks.

diable

Can you add the laptops mac address to the routers approved list?

Belnahua

diable wrote: »

Can you add the laptops mac address to the routers approved list?

Please tell me what this would do?

I've already said I've established a connection to the router and been given a DHCP IP address, the problem is with VISTA not being allowed to tell it it's a safe network and allow the traffic through!

toastydave

try turning off the security on the router, and try to connect again, to rule out wpa problems,

You might have an I.P. address but maybe no dns

once you get the laptop to connect to the router, can you open up a dos box (Start menu ==> Run box> type CMD")

the type ipconfig /all and post the results?

Belnahua

toastydave wrote: »

As i remember with vista, it been a while, in network connections you have to tell it what kind of network your on, eg public, home, ect, vista then changes the firewall setup to "help" you

the setup is different for each network adaptor, I would guess you have public network settings on the wireless and so the firewall is refusing file sharing connections.

i think you need to connect to your router via wifi, then look at network map and change the setting, sorry its a bit vague, its been 6 months since I last used vista

That's the whole problem. I get this far, then Vista throws a wobbly and refuses to let me change it, and goes back to being an unidentified network, but the wired network, Vista is quite happy to accept as a private safe network!