beetle Posted September 22, 2009 Share Posted September 22, 2009 But I've just spent several hours banging my head against the wall. My husband just bought a new netbook today so he can go online and stuff while he's traveling. I'm much more computer savvy that he is so I was all excited to get the netbook connected to my wireless network so I could show him how while he's out travelling. Damned if the thing just WOULD NOT CONNECT. I did everything I could think of. I know what I'm doing. I set up the wireless network in this house to begin with. I even turned off my MAC filtering and other security measures at the router to make sure there was nothing getting in the way. The damned netbook can see the router (gives me signal strength and everything) it JUST WILL NOT CONNECT to it. I'm at a loss. I tried it using Windows built in wireless networking utility and I tried it using the netbook's wireless adapter's utility. Nope nothing nadda. Both ways, the netbook sees my router but won't or can't connect. I'm to the point where the only thing I can think of is hardware incompatibility. I know it shouldn't matter but I've got an old US Robotics wireless router (I think I'm the only one who ever bought one). Of course the wireless card in my laptop is also US Robotics and connects just fine. The laptop with the US Robotics adapter card can connect to other networks (like at the coffee shop or whatever) just fine. I just can't get this new netbook to connect. I've got the old school technology but the netbook ought to be backwards compatible with it. I just don't know. The next step is we're going to take it to the place down the road with wifi and see if I can get it to connect there. It should be easy. You scan for available networks and blamo, you connect to one, provided they aren't using a WEP or WAP key. I even disabled all that stuff on my router. No luck. This was more a rant than anything else. I'm frustrated as hell cause I wanted to be able to get the thing set up for him. And I know I know what I'm doing. Fuck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NailFlower Posted September 23, 2009 Share Posted September 23, 2009 did you google it? like put in 'how do I connect my netbook to my router' or something like that http://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+I+connect+my+netbook+to+my+router&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a I'd play around with different search terms, like the brand of netbook, the us robotics info, etc. somebodies out there have had this same problem and posted the solution somewhere on the net... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
celestia Posted September 23, 2009 Share Posted September 23, 2009 I got my kid a netbook in July and we had a similar problem. Took the same steps. When we were able to connect via a direct connection it was okay and he could get online at the local coffee shop. Ultimately, we did replace the router and everything worked fine after that. I knew in advance though that I had a relatively crappy router to start with. Maybe your ISP could help you. Comcast did help us some. It turned out our modem was bad too but that only impacted download speed and not connection. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Swamp56 Posted September 23, 2009 Share Posted September 23, 2009 Stupid question: 'Have you tried resetting the router/modem' ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beetle Posted September 23, 2009 Author Share Posted September 23, 2009 I got my kid a netbook in July and we had a similar problem. Took the same steps. When we were able to connect via a direct connection it was okay and he could get online at the local coffee shop. Ultimately, we did replace the router and everything worked fine after that. I knew in advance though that I had a relatively crappy router to start with. Maybe your ISP could help you. Comcast did help us some. It turned out our modem was bad too but that only impacted download speed and not connection. That's about where I'm at right now...router/netbook incompatibility. I've tried everything I know how to do. Maybe US robotics is using some proprietary crap that only lets US Robotics adapters connect to the router. I know I can take my laptop with the US Robotics wireless adapter out to places with wifi and connect no problem. Maybe that's all it is. Just try to go out someplace that has wifi and see if the results are the same. Hopefully not. The whole point of the stupid thing is to be able to be mobile and connected so it shouldn't be this hard to get it connected to wifi. My ISP is a joke, long story. I have to call India for support and then they read off of flash cards. This isn't a problem with the modem anyway. Thanks though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beetle Posted September 23, 2009 Author Share Posted September 23, 2009 Stupid question: 'Have you tried resetting the router/modem' ? I've power cycled it several times through this process and every time I made a change in the firmware it dose a soft restart. The only thing I haven't done is the dreaded "set back to factory settings". I'm a little afraid to do that and then mess up the connectivity of my laptop. At least it connects to the stupid router. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grousemouse Posted September 23, 2009 Share Posted September 23, 2009 does your router have dhcp switched on? ie. does it automatically hand out an ip address to a computer connecting to it? i think this is usually the default but perhaps you set it to have manually assigned ip's. in which case you just need to find out what network your router uses eg. 192.168.1.0 and what netmask eg. 255.255.255.0, and then on your new machine enter a valid address and mask eg. 192.168.1.10, 255.255.255.0 and it should work. or perhaps not. isn't this kind of thing fun? good luck, grouse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Swamp56 Posted September 23, 2009 Share Posted September 23, 2009 Another possible issue is that if you're setting this up for the first time, your router could be interering with your modem; when I set up networking at my mom's house, the router defaulted to 192.168.1.1, which was the modem's address, so I had to change it to something like 192.168.2.1 . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beetle Posted September 23, 2009 Author Share Posted September 23, 2009 does your router have dhcp switched on? ie. does it automatically hand out an ip address to a computer connecting to it? i think this is usually the default but perhaps you set it to have manually assigned ip's. in which case you just need to find out what network your router uses eg. 192.168.1.0 and what netmask eg. 255.255.255.0, and then on your new machine enter a valid address and mask eg. 192.168.1.10, 255.255.255.0 and it should work. or perhaps not. isn't this kind of thing fun? good luck, grouse. Yes. I do have it set to DHCP. I used to assign IPs but changed that. Like I said, my other wireless device connects no problem. And with the netbook, I'm not even getting to the point where it could receive an IP from the router because it's not making the wifi connection at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grousemouse Posted September 23, 2009 Share Posted September 23, 2009 can you ping 127.0.0.1 on your netbook? if so then your tcp/ip protocol setup is probably fine. if not then i'd go into your wifi connection on your netbook and make sure tcp/ip is enabled. it should be i think, but i don't recall the defaults for windows. also, make sure you're using the right wireless protocol, like a, b, g, n. for both units. grouse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beetle Posted September 23, 2009 Author Share Posted September 23, 2009 Went down to the local pub and it connected to their wifi with no problem. It's likely that US Robotics is doing some weird proprietary shit that only allows US Robotics network adapters connect to the router. There is nothing about the way the router is set up that should cause probelms or the netbook itself. We just proved it by connecting the netbook to a different network today. Now, the utility for the network adapter itself is buggy and won't work. I have to disable it and use the built in Windows wireless utility to get connected but it worked fine. So, there's my answer I guess. Crappy old hardware. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grousemouse Posted September 23, 2009 Share Posted September 23, 2009 fair enough. i wasn't aware of routers doing proprietary things like that. cheers, grouse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beetle Posted September 23, 2009 Author Share Posted September 23, 2009 fair enough. i wasn't aware of routers doing proprietary things like that. cheers, grouse. Yeah, I'm not 100% sure that's what the conflict is but I vaguely remember something when I bought it about it using some different technology that made it faster than what the norm was for the time. I bet that has something to do with it. It had a great rebate which is why I bought it. I didn't realize at the time that it might cause future conflict with other non US robotics products and really it didn't matter because I had bought the wireless adapter cards for my laptop and other PC (both US Robotics so using the same technology) and never thought about trying to connect a different wireless device. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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