Quote Originally Posted by Muirenn View Post
If your network is set to the old standard, WEP, you could have some problems. It may depend what kind of computer you have. I had to change from WEP to WLAN when I bought a new computer last summer. I had two older computers. The oldest (8 year old computer) only worked on the old WEP, the 4 year old computer could utilize WEP or WLAN, and the new one I bought last summer only worked on WLAN. I had to call my internet company so they could change me from WEP to WLAN. They didn't really want to because they'd never heard of this problem, but I got the advice from Mac. (New computer is a Mac, but I don't think it matters whether it's a Mac or PC).

After the change (from WEP) the oldest computer couldn't access the internet any longer. The new Mac was slow on the internet under old protocol (WEP), and couldn't download anything at all until changed to WLAN.

Anyway. Worth trying. Could be an easy fix.

I also second buying a new router.

Edit: I just finally located what protocol is on my new computer, and it looks like the new is WEP, the old WLAN, so...reverse the above. Sorry, I'm not an IT. If anyone has anything to add to this. It certainly worked. Anyway, check your protocol, and have them try a different one. Sounds like exactly what worked with mine.
Okay, I'm a little confused by this. I'm software developer but I know close to nothing about hardware.

The laptop is WLAN. I can see that on the specs that I saved from the original packaging.

I don't see WLAN anywhere in the router specs. When I set up the router I had a choice of WEP encryption or WPA-PSK. I chose WPA-PSK.

I have a friend on facebook who had me run several commands in the CMD window.

1. First I pinged google.com 1200 times. Results were:
Packets: Sent: 1200, Received: 1160, Lost: 40 (3%)
Approx. round trip times in milliseconds: min. 20 max. 153 avg 26.

I saw some "Request timed out" messages and some "General Failure" messages. There was no pattern -- there would be anywhere from 9 to almost 100 successful packets sent in between timeout/failure messages.

2. Then I did "tracert google.com" 3 times. The first time I got General Failure after the second hop. The second time I got a request timeout (8th hop) but it did finish in 12. The third time it finished in 11. (My friend said I should see < 30 hops between my laptop and google.)

3. Then I did ipconfig and saw this. My friend hasn't answered yet but based on the wording of his questions to me it appears that a blank DNS suffix is a problem.

Wireless LAN adapter wireless network connection
Connection specific DNS suffix: [blank]
Link-local IPv6 address: [string of letters, numbers and colons]
IPv4 address: [looks like a normal IP address type thing]
subnet mask: [looks like a normal IP address type thing]
default gateway: [looks like a normal IP address type thing]


This is all very interesting (which I guess means I'm a nerd!). Thanks very much for your answers. I am interested in hearing what my fb friend has to say, since it's quite possible that I configured the router wrong. I will definitely be getting a new one anyway, but it would certainly be good to know the right way to configure that one so I don't run into this problem again.

Interesting that no one is indicating that the 802.11bg wireless thing in the laptop is out of date and should be updated. I would get an N router when I get a new one, but it would be held back by the laptop.