Connection problem!

hello everyone my name is shane and i just purchased a refurbed dell d600 from ebay for 350 bucks about two months ago and i am starting to have problems and my warrenty ran out after 30 days! so let me tell you what is happening! we have three computers here, the main computer that is plugged into the wall and a router (i think), (we have phone, tv, and internet threw time warner cable and we have road runner) and we have 2 laptops, my sisters wich is the one i am on right now and mine, wich is haveing the problems! the two laptops are wireless hers is a d610 and was added a day before mine and it has way better signal than mine! well here is the problem, just yesterday i was useing my laptop on the internet it was working fine, although not perfect, like i always get kicked offline, and when i have to "repair" te signal i have to go stand next to the router, (wich time warner cable installed), then after i stand next to it and hit repair the signal comes back, but then if i go into m y room i get kicked off again, where as my sisters you can go anywhere with it in the house and never get kicked off! well i was able to accsess the internet yester day, now this morning it says, wireless connection 10, not connected, firewalled. and now i can not get signal, even if i stand next to the router thingy it still does not pick up signal! can some one help, thanks, Shane

Hello Shane, Is the wireless signal of the router secured? If so, which security does it use? How far away from the router is your room? What Operating system do the different PCs have? Lets see if we can figure out what is going on here Regards, Olrik

In addition to Artellos' important questions… Does your Sister's laptop get good signal and access the internet correctly in locations where yours fails, for instance in your room? Have you used Control Panel - Network Connections to select your LAN and have you used the "Enable this network device" option there?

hello sorry for the long wait, but it is hard to get a hold of a computer around here, well my sisters laptop gets servise every where in the house, even in my room, all my net work connections said firewalled so i disabled my firewall and now none of them say firewalled, but i still cannot get signal even when i am standing next to the router like i always do when i try to pick up signal! they both have the same operating system i believe! i dont know much about these so if you guys want to give me step by step directions i will follow them and and give you the results, i wish i could give you a certain code so you can enter my computer and see all its info and what is wrong with it, lol well thanks for all your help hopefully i can get this fixed, thanks, Shane

It is a complicating factor that you initially were able to receive wireless signal, and then it became intermittent and problematic, and then failed completely.

This suggests a problem with the configuration of your laptop's wireless device or problem with the device itself.

Open your Device Manager to see if there are any yellow or red warnings.

Right-click on My Computer - Select - Hardware(tab) - click - Device Manager(button)
Particularly have a look at Network Adapters <– any warnings?

Consider reinstalling the Driver for the Network Adapter.
____________________

Second,
Since it is most likely that your home Router selected to have some sort of encryption in the default setup, you could run the Network Connection Setup Wizard from the first machine on the network.
The last panel of that Wizard sequence will offer "Create a Network Setup Disk"
Save the Network Setup Disk to Floppy Disk or CD or to a USB memory device.
Then Run the Network Setup Disk on your Laptop.
That will cause your Laptop to have the same settings as the other machines and possibly correct the problem for you.
_____________-________

Third,
If the above hasn't helped…
Click on Network Connection in Control Panel
Click on "Enable this Connection"
or
Click on "Repair this Connection"
or
As a last resort, download and run Winsockxpfix.exe from here: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/winsockxpfix.html

Keep us posted with your progress.

Best Regards

…. and now i can not get signal, even if i stand next to the router thingy it still does not pick up signal! can some one help, …

You should get no closer than 4ft away. The radiation pattern is like a donut; there's a hole in the middle.

When you open the "view available wireless networks" does it detect ANY wireless networks ?
If "no", then the Radio may have been turned-off.

The manual for your laptop contains this note:

"NOTE: When your computer is running on battery power, the Network Disabled power scheme disables your internal network and wireless activity. When your computer is connected to an electrical outlet or docking device, the Network Disabled power scheme disables only your wireless activity. You must set the power scheme through QuickSet (not Microsoft® Windows®) for Network Disabled to work."

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/syst…00/en/index.htm

In addition, the Radio maybe turned-off manually by pressing the Blue [fn] key, holding it down, then press [F2], this enables and disables BOTH the WiFi and Bluetooth radios.

Tallon41

well i have fixed the problem! i ended up calling time warner cable and they told me to go to start, control panel, administrative tools, services, scroll down click wireless zero config, under service tab click start, (couse it was stopped for some reason, then i click ok and go back to control panel and click wireles network connections, right click network connections click properties, click the wireless networks tab, check the box next to let windows configure network blah blah what ever it said then click ok, then i held down my blue FN key and hit F2 and a towere came up for a sec with circles around it and then my wireless connection was fixed, thanks for all your help guys you are great! SHANE

… then i held down my blue FN key and hit F2 and a towere came up for a sec with circles around it and then my wireless connection was fixed,…

Which means your Wireless Radio was turned-off…..as mentioned above.
That was the whole problem probably.

Tallon41

well i tried just doing th fn thing before and it did not work, the only thing is i had to turn of my nortan antivirus couse as soon as i get the connection back to started my nortan stops it, but as long as nortan is disabled permanently then it is fine, shane

Thanks for letting us know, shane101 Good work Tallon41 and Artellos!

But …. if Norton is disabled you don't have any anti-virus running. That is not a good scenario. You need to figure out why Norton is causing the problem or switch to another AV program.

ok i will look into nortans website and see whats up, thanks Shane

Thanks Ztruker. I read that, started to include it in my reply and then the phone started ringing. So much for multi-tasking. I'm sure glad you stepped in on that one! Doug

Shane, you could give one of the free AVs a try:

AVG Free
Avast
Avira Anti-Vir

or the recently released Comodo Internet Suite