Laptop wifi problem - wifi will not access IE but wired nic will - any ideas plaese?

Just had a mate on the phone and has the following problem.

His partneer has a nice new HP NC4000 and they have put a W400 Mini PCI WiFi
card into it.

He is using a BT Voyager 2000 modem router on TalTalk

He also has an old Tosh laptop with a 54g PCMCIA card in it and that works
fine in WiFi with the router so all appears well there.

The NC4000 can connect to the internet via the thernet port hard wired to
the router, but in WiFi mode it finds the SSID of the router and reports a
connection, but when connecting to the internet via IE it reports a DNS
error. It also cannot ping the router via WiFi.

At first we thought this was a problem with the W400 card as it was bought
used from eBay, but have also tried a USB WiFi stick and the 54g PCMCIA card
from his Tosh laptop, and all give the same symptoms.

So last night I talked him through fixing the DHCP range in the router to
192.168.1.100 - 255, router has IP 192.168.1.1.

Then fix the IP address of the WiFI connection inthe NC4000 to IP addy
192.168.1.10, subnet 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.1.1
Prefered DNS 192.168.1.1 Sec. DNS as 192.168.1.10

He has now done a clean install of XP Pro with SP2 and all of HPs updates,
and still has no WiFi access to the internet. Wired is still working. Wired
connection works with both fixed IP address of say 192.168.1.9 or obtain
automatically.

We also tried this yesterday on my home LAN with WiFi using his Tosh, my
N410C and the above NC4000, the other two laptops were OK but the NC4000
still refused to connect in IE. Thats is when the XP istalation seemed
flakey, and I suggested a reinstall, but still the problem remains

Any idea gfolks, this one has me baffled.

TIA

DeeBee

 

Set it back to DHCP for everything!

See above.

This is the right way. But did you remember to reboot everything IN
ORDER to get it working?
This is where alot of people make there mistake. You MUST reboot
EVERYTHING! Start with the router, then AFTER it is up and synched
power up the router, then after it is up restart the computer.
Should be working fine. The problem is that when you change the
settings they MUST be changed all the way up the line, the router
cannot AUTOMATICALLY switch from giving out IP addresses to not givng
them out and back again on the fly.

ALSO check the settings of the router to make sure you do NOT have MAC
filtering turned on and if it IS on make sure you did put it into the
system.

 

Yep, the router is automatically reboot after each setting is changed. Hit
button that say save and restart, or something like that. Or does the router
have to be physically rebooted / reset?

Aslo told my mate to reboot the laptop everytime he changes a setting.

I guess I will have to go over there again during the week.

Cheers

DeeBee

 

I would physically reboot the router, then the laptop, EVERYTIME!

That may end up being the best way to fix it.

 

Most laptops have a built in wired network connection, and the IE is set to
use that or Dial-up (actually DUN = Dial up Networking). It will not usually
be set up for both wired and wireless. I go into control panel, network, set
up a home network (it will bridge the wired and wireless connections). If
you have any sort of firewall software, (sp2 or 3rd party) you will have to
make up rules/exceptions to allow that other (wireless) network to
work/rather than be blocked by the firewall.