Weird network problem

[geekmarine]

So the other day, I left for work, and the Internet connection on my desktop was working just fine. I came home from work to find out that while the network connection was just fine, I could not access the Internet. However, my laptop and my Wii could connect to the Internet just fine, so I knew it wasn't the router or my Internet connection. I rebooted, hoping that might fix the problem, but that just made it worse - while my computer still says it's connected to the network, it now can't find files being shared over the network by my laptop. Deciding that it might be the wifi card, so I moved the computer over next to the router at great effort so I could just use an ethernet cable to connect, and even after plugging it in directly and disabling the wifi card, I still have the same problem.

I've tried searching the Internet, but so far I haven't found anything like what I'm describing. The computer is running Vista, and when I try to use Vista's diagnostics, it keeps saying the problem must be with the router, even though I've already established that the router is working just fine (and in fact, this post made from my laptop is direct evidence that the router is working fine). I was just wondering if anyone had any ideas here, because I'm out of ideas, and I'm especially baffled about what could have possibly happened while my computer was in sleep mode while I was at work. I think my next approach here is to simply go after the damn thing with a hammer.

[Planky]

Does it have the routers IP set as the Gateway on the either the wifi or the NIC?

I did have a similar problem eons ago. Resetting the router fixed it, despite everything else connected to it being fine.

[RestlessRodent]

geekmarine said:

So the other day, I left for work, and the Internet connection on my desktop was working just fine. I came home from work to find out that while the network connection was just fine, I could not access the Internet. However, my laptop and my Wii could connect to the Internet just fine, so I knew it wasn't the router or my Internet connection. I rebooted, hoping that might fix the problem, but that just made it worse - while my computer still says it's connected to the network, it now can't find files being shared over the network by my laptop. Deciding that it might be the wifi card, so I moved the computer over next to the router at great effort so I could just use an ethernet cable to connect, and even after plugging it in directly and disabling the wifi card, I still have the same problem.

I've tried searching the Internet, but so far I haven't found anything like what I'm describing. The computer is running Vista, and when I try to use Vista's diagnostics, it keeps saying the problem must be with the router, even though I've already established that the router is working just fine (and in fact, this post made from my laptop is direct evidence that the router is working fine). I was just wondering if anyone had any ideas here, because I'm out of ideas, and I'm especially baffled about what could have possibly happened while my computer was in sleep mode while I was at work. I think my next approach here is to simply go after the damn thing with a hammer.

Try a restart, if that fails, check to see if you have manually set the IP settings and such. If not, check the connection details and ensure the ip, subnet mask, route, and gateway are correct for your network.

[Maes]

I only had this sort of issues with Vista when using a WPA secured connection: for some reason it just craps out on those, by connecting/disconnecting all the time or appearing connected but not doing jack, and I either had to use unsecured (or WEP, which is the the same) wifi, switch to an ethernet cable (which kinda defeated the purpose) or plug the ethernet cable temporarily so the wifi adapter could "acquire a lock" somehow and after that I could remove the cable...which also defeated the purpose.

The solution? Given that Ubuntu and XP with the same card(s) on the same PC and the same router didn't give me any issues, I switched back to them and never look at Vista again. This problem happened to me with Intel ABG 3945 adapters as well as an asus PCI-e wifi adapter, under Vista. Especially the Intel problem is well known but never fixed (and MS will force you to use their own crappy driver and wifi manager, not allowing an updgrade nor the use of the Intel's wifi manager under Vista...fuck that shit).

To be honest however, I've had the same exact problem you described a couple of days ago on XP, but first I had got a weird dialog panel about "Network identification has changed, you must reboot" which I'd never seen before, probably after a security update. Rebooting the PC indeed solved the problem.

[Aliotroph?]

Last time I had that happen to both the wi-fi and ethernet I had to do a factory reset on my router. In my case that was really defaulting the settings in DD-WRT, since it works better than factory firmware.

If none of the things fix it, my next question is what's your security software? Broken installs of Norton and McAfee are good at frying network connections like that. If that's the case, you can usually fix them by ripping out the software with the company's removal tool (more reliable than the uninstaller) and reinstalling it.

If all else fails a system restore might fix it too.

[geekmarine]

Well, after much more research, I've been able to at least identify the problem, which, as I've suspected has nothing to do with either the hardware or the router (as the router works just fine with all other Internet devices in my house, and both ethernet and wifi give me the same results). Apparently, there's something screwy with Vista itself. Unfortunately, though, the solutions I've been able to find don't seem to help. The two main solutions I've seen are to uninstall Norton, which I don't have installed in the first place, and to ensure the default gateway isn't set to 0.0.0.0, which it isn't. The other thing I learned, much to my dismay, is that there are a wide variety of circumstances that can lead to this situation. All I've got to say at this point is that I really friggin' hate Vista. There really is no friggin' excuse for an OS being so friggin' broken, especially when I find out that the problem is actually fairly common, and that, despite a wide range of causes, ultimately the fault lies with utterly shitty programming on Microsoft's part.

[Maes]

geekmarine said:

PROTIP: Apparently, there's something screwy with Vista itself.