Boss' laptop not working with her home Tiscali router

[MarcLister]

What up, clever chaps. :D My boss has a Dell laptop that she uses at home to dial-in to her work computer so she can work from home. She's been having trouble getting the wireless (I think the wireless) to work with the Tiscali router she and her husband have got.

Her husband is fairly decent with IT but he's not been able to solve the issue and she's asked me to look into it. I'm going to ring Dell on Monday morning to see if they've got any ideas or have heard of other Dell laptop users experiencing the same things with Tiscali.

I was wondering if anyone here has had the same problem or has had to fix it for someone else and knows what I could do to get things working again.

I've got her husband to check the network connections and proxy settings and they're OK so without ringing Dell or getting new information I'm at a loss. Any help or suggestions would be most useful. :)

[Dymetrie]

How old is the laptop (most notably the wireless network card) and what encryption is she running on the wireless router?

I had an older 802.11 B card which wouldn't work with WPA, only WEP...

Just a thought as to what could be causing the problems.

[MarcLister]

Cheers Dymetrie. I'll have a look tomorrow.

[Daz]

Checking network connection and proxy settings implies the wireless is connecting but not going anywhere - is that correct?

[MarcLister]

I believe so yes. I wrote down some instructions on settings for her husband to check and she tells me that all the settings were as they should have been. I've not actually had a chance to look at the laptop yet. The boss has put it in her diary to bring it in tomorrow.

[MarcLister]

How old is the laptop (most notably the wireless network card)Brand new pretty much. No more than 2 months since we bought it. It is a new Dell Latitude something or other. :p

[Mark]

So assuming they didn't take the cheapskate option it should support pretty much everything then. Even my two-year-old D830 can talk 802.11n (though not as well as I'd like) and WPA2-Personal.

Best thing then is to pull up the connection status and see what it says. Not connected, limited connectivity, etc.

[Burble]

It sounds like the laptop isn't actually connected to the wireless network. I've seen it happen countless times where Windows and/or the manufacturers software for the wireless card report that the card is connected to the network when it actually isn't. In each case it's been a wireless key entered incorrectly.

I've only seen that happen with WEP (eurgh) though but it is entirely possible that Tiscali supply routers using WEP - BT still do.

[MarcLister]

So assuming they didn't take the cheapskate option it should support pretty much everything then. Even my two-year-old D830 can talk 802.11n (though not as well as I'd like) and WPA2-Personal.

Best thing then is to pull up the connection status and see what it says. Not connected, limited connectivity, etc.It's a fairly decent Dell. Might even be the same model as my laptop. :p

It sounds like the laptop isn't actually connected to the wireless network. I've seen it happen countless times where Windows and/or the manufacturers software for the wireless card report that the card is connected to the network when it actually isn't. In each case it's been a wireless key entered incorrectly.

I've only seen that happen with WEP (eurgh) though but it is entirely possible that Tiscali supply routers using WEP - BT still do.I will check this out. :)