Vista Network Issue

[A_Traveller]

Anyone help on this. I've a colleague in Bangkok who unboxed a new HP desktop today, with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. Plugging it into the LAN wall socket he's unable to see the internet. The pretty <sigh> window tells him that the LAN is 'unidentified' and that access is local [red cross through the line between the LAN & the globe] The same socket & cable works perfectly on an XP setup.

He'd googled and found some mention of this, but mostly as a wireless issue with comments going back to Vista launch!

The location is a multiple office which provides LAN access to the internet [allegedly no one else has an issue] so there's no opportunity to make changes there. Both the XP and Vista boxes have wireless and blue-tooth [there's some mention about Vista having an issue with multiple access methods].

Suggestions?

Kit HP m9198d Pavilion Vista Home Premium. He has removed Norton [it was never commissioned] and run Norton's removal tool as well. Has also tried no firewall etc.

Regards & TIA

[lopburi3]

I lost internet when I installed SP2 on my HP Vista Home Premium computer (but computer 2 year old model) which has worked fine up until that update. I have still not been able to resolve. Removed the SP2 and all was back to normal. Have done this 3 times. It also works normally using Win7 RC dual boot and have access to router. But no internet connection at all and does not find my normal home network or allow me to establish a new network.

[RKASA]

Your plugging into a local network.  Try another PC on that outlet.  Then you know you have a LAN that works not just in the office but at that outlet, they are sometimes unplugged back at the switch.  Then just run the connection setup in the vista.  or you could plug the PC into another outlet that is knowen to work and then do setup.  Check with someone that maintains that network.

[A_Traveller]

Thanks for the responses. The connexion that works [in XP] is the same physical socket/cable which fails under Vista.

There's a lot of chatter about this, mostly focused on wireless though. In short, if you are affected then in a number of cases the answer was to buy a new NIC or router! Believe the office people are working on the basis that 'it works for everybody else'.

Regards

PS One option that went through my mind, given that both systems have WiFi is setting up an ad-hoc 'network' though with the XP as the shared internet provider. walnut ... sledgehammer ... rearrange.

Edited June 11, 2009 by A_Traveller

[endure]

Is the Vista machine using DHCP? Is it being assigned an IP address/default gateway address/DNS server address? Can it ping itself/the default gateway/the DNS server?

[A_Traveller]

Replies to queries where known:-

If Vista is plugged into the LAN set to default [DHCP] it does not find the gateway and uses a private address which appears to be sourced from Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA). The registry edits to switch this off don't work in Vista [it's now part of the dlls] <sigh>. Broadcast Flag has been set to ignore within registry as well. An attempt was made using static addressing but this failed as well.

Don't know the ping situation, sorry.

Any help guidance or new thesaurus of swear words would be welcomed, I believe.

Regards

[endure]

Are you sure that the network card/socket in the Vista machine is ok? Is the link light on by the network socket? Getting a 169 address often means that the NIC is faulty or the drivers aren't installed.

[A_Traveller]

^ My understanding is that the card 'lights up' when the cable is plugged in, and that one experiment was to remove the NIC from the device manager and let Vista rediscover it as new hardware thereby forcing a driver/device reinstall.

Regards

[endure]

The card should light up when the cable is plugged in regardless of whether the drivers are installed. It shows that the NIC is physically connected to the network. Can you plug the machine into a dsocket using a different cable? If it won't connect then it may be that the NIC itself is faulty.

[A_Traveller]

With PC set to use DHCP, ping to localhost [127.1...] works but gateway generates error 1231.

The location has a single wall LAN socket with cable [which, to reiterate work fine 'out of the box' in XP'

Regards

Edited June 15, 2009 by A_Traveller