Wireless Connection Problem: Adding New Laptop?

Okay so we've got a functioning wireless network and one laptop is using it right now, but a friend just moved in and her laptop is not connecting properly.

She uses Windows Vista and it has a built-in wireless card. I'm not computer-stupid, but I have no experience with Vista prior to this, and I'm finding it to be incredibly frustrating.

We scan for the network, find it, connect to it and enter in the security code. We get connected with 56Mpb/s but for some reason it says "Limited Connectivity." How would one go about adding permissions for this laptop? I try scanning for Wireless Devices and for some reason it's not detected or listed. It's like they're both connected to the same network, but can't see each other.. Very weird.

Help plz?

Reply to
Lockdown.Xax
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nevermind... i didn't see all this stuff about USB flash drives and manually transferring over network info and whatnot. problem solved. my bad.

Reply to
Lockdown.Xax

"Limited Connectivity" is Microsoft-speak for your encryption key just failed. Some questions first:

  1. What maker and model of router are you using? Be sure to include the hardware version number as found on the serial number tag.
  2. Duz it have the latest firmware installed? If not, check the manufactory web pile. Some updates were released to deal with Vista DHCP problems.
  3. Are you using WEP encryption? If so, it's not very secure ans has ASCII to Hex conversion problems. Change the encryption type in the router to WPA-PSK-TKIP. WPA2-PSK-AES is more secure, but I keep running into connection problems, so I prefer the somewhat less secure flavor.
  4. Is the Vista laptop updated to the latest MS fixes? There was a large number of wireless related fixed issued about 9 months ago. I covered some of the DHCP related issues about 2 years ago in:

Most of these were fixed with updates, but it doesn't hurt to check. If it's a very old router, it's likely to be the broadcast flag problem:

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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