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LAN woes

Greetings All

If you know of a more appropriate NG please let me know I'll gladly post there. Meanwhile............

Daughter has a Dell notebook running WXP Home SP2. Connects just fine at home with either cable or wireless through a Linksys wireless router. Also took it over to a neighbors house, and it picked up his internet just fine with a lan cable. (letting it obtain DNS and IP address automatically)

Her dorm connection went just fine last fall, first power up and she was in the university's system.

She's moved to a sorority, and no dice. The "network" person rebooted the houses' router when she moved in. That's about the extent of her knowledge of networking. My daughter doesn't like fiddling, and being 300 miles from home, and trying to trouble shoot over the phone sucks.

We've tried: turning off windows firewall, running connection wizard a couple times, letting it try to bridge it.

I've asked her to get the router's IP address and we'll try to set up a static address, but she's disgusted, and doesn't want to mess with it any more. Plus I doubt the "network" sister could find the settings anyway. SIGH.

Think I'm gonna end up just hiring someone to do it, but would like to get her to try the hard settings first. Plus me trying to explain how to do it is tough too, I'm not good with explanations.

Any easy ideas I might try and get her coaxed into humoring me with; and like Denzel Washington once said "Explain it to me like a 6 year old" so I could walk them through it. Too easy to get frustrated when working with your own kids.

Thanks

Mark

Reply to
pheasant
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Reply to
Robbie McFerren

Not a parent are you.

Reply to
pheasant

If the wireless connection is enabled, there should be an icon on the right side of the Task Bar. In SP2 if it's not connected it will have a little red "x" on the lower right side of the icon.

Put the mouse pointer over the Wireless icon and do a right click. There should be an option to search for wireless connections and then after it searches it will display any connections it can find. If she clicks on the available connections and cannot establish a connection, then she should contact the schools IM (Information Management) Department for assistance. I have never encountered a college where an IM would not help the students with problems like this!

pheasant wrote:

Reply to
Dee

He/She/It sounds like a High School dropout!

Of course it could also be blamed on the weather in North Dakota.

His/Her/Its brain isn't functioning at full speed in the cold weather!!!

Reply to
Dee

You must not be native Schweiz.

Reply to
Dee

she is at university ?! she should have a little more brain capacity than a 6 year old, let her solve her own problems.

Reply to
Ali Babba

I do. That's why I canceled that post. But you should have enough intelligence to comprehend that not everyone in the world is computer literate!

Reply to
Dee

You should hire someone and be done with it.

Duane :)

Reply to
Duane Arnold

I find it hard to beleive not one other sorrority sister knows how the networking works. How did everyone else network their computer? With computers it can be tough to network remotely. She might have something wrong with something in windows. A lot depends on how the router is set up. Maybe she needs to find some sympathetic geek male friend and offer to buy him a pizza or something to help her. The obvious would be to look at someone elses computer and see how it is hooked up. Of course it could be here wiring is bad also. Cant really test that over the phone. If she has a laptop, she could test it in another room.

Reply to
Last Boy Scout

My apologies for the poor 'advice' you've had from most of the other replies. The best advice was from the poster who suggested asking the uni IT dept for support, I'm sure that they'd be keen to help. If not, then the following links may be helpful in solving the problem (but may not necessarily satisfy the 6-year-old criterion).

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Hope this helps

Reply to
nospam

and you should know that North Dakota is not in Switserland :)

Reply to
Ali Babba

I have noticed that WIndows XP will not automatically connect to a router that is not password protected unless you go into the network settings and check the box that says "allow connection to unsecure network". That might be the reason.

But uh, if neither she nor the official network person knows how to get her connected maybe the whole place should hire someone so they aren't accidently sharing their whole network and maybe even files on their hard drive with anyone within 300 feet.

Reply to
o-chan

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