UPC wireless and Vista

smac1990

Hi

We recently got upc in the house (25mb) with a thomson 870 router. Since we got it we have had two technicians out to the house and spent ages on the phone to customer support. The thing is that the ps3 can connect to wireless but none of the four laptops in the house can. When we contacted UPC they said the fact that we had windows vista was the problem, is there anyway we can resolve this issue and get wireless working?

Thanks

Random

What error are you getting when you try to connect on the Vista laptops?

mark17j

There was somebody on here with a similar issue like this before who also had Vista and couldn't connect to wireless. They were told to change their Wifi security to WEP, after advice on here, and it seemed to have done the trick.

smac1990

it normally says it cant connect to the DNS server, I have checked the settings such as wep and they all seem to b allright. getting sick of it now to b honest.

jor el

Moved to the Windows forum, since the problem lies with your OS.

There are known issues with Vista and WPA security. Not sure what the solution is.

RolandIRL

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056397551

I'm having the same problem. Didn't get it working, i'm afraid, but you can try some of the fixes posted in the thread i linked there. Hopefully they might work for you

Dayo93

Having the same problem here, windows 7 laptop and Android Phone connect no problem to UPC wireless, but Windows Vista Premium cannot connect. when I diagnose the problem it tells me the "wireless network key is not correct " even though it is.

jor el

jor el wrote: »

Moved to the Windows forum, since the problem lies with your OS.

There are known issues with Vista and WPA security. Not sure what the solution is.

If the laptops are on Vista RTM, then installing Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2 (must install 1 before 2) should sort it. I haven't seen it on any recent Vista machines.

steveon

Some vista machines have problems loggin onto wireless networks using WPA2 encryption. However I fixed a few members of my family who had problems by changing the channel the the wireless router broadcasts at, which default it channel 1 on some of the UPC routers, I changed this to chanell 11 and have had no problems since.

carveone

I think step 1 is to connect with a physical cable to rule out any problems which are not wireless problems.

If that works then it's probably a driver issue - UPC routers are preset with WPA encryption. A lot of Vista laptops have drivers which are a bit unhappy with WPA but will work with WEP.

Check for later drivers. I said it on the other thread and I hope this will fix your problem, but it didn't seem to work for Roland Deschain who had the issue. It did work for the guy in my house, although it took some persuading!

In essence, updating the driver "automatically" through Device Manager (ie: Network Connections, Right click the adapter, Properties, Configure, Driver, Update Driver, Search Automatically) does not give you a later driver. This is annoying.

While you are in that list, check the model number of type of the wireless adapter and try and get a later driver. For the Atheros adapters you can get later drivers from an "unofficial" Atheros website at atheros.cz.

Download the zip file, expand it somewhere and then repeat the steps as above, but click "Browse" instead of "Search Automatically" and point it to the place you expanded the zip file...

carveone

Give some details of your laptops and I'm sure someone can advise on drivers. Pretty much all of the Vista based Toshiba laptops, the Satellites anyway, use Atheros cards.

I'm absolutely positive the original drivers with those will never work with WPA or WPA2 encryption. They'll get an IP address via DHCP but that's it...

{^Syntax^}

The problem is Vista.. (Without even reading the thread!)

Capt'n Midnight

{^Syntax^} wrote: »

The problem is Vista.. (Without even reading the thread!)

Neither funny nor original.

And if you'd read the thread ...

Capt'n Midnight

WEP should only be used to test the hardware as it offers no protection from someone prepared to spend a evening googling cracks.

walk through all the stuff
change the encryption key if it's all 0-9,A-F in case one side is using hex and the other alphanumeric

if you can't see the AP then remember USA settings can't see the higher channels

carveone

That's a good point there from CM about the encryption key.

It's also interesting how many problems people were reporting with the Kindle WiFi until someone copped that all the "problem" routers were using channels above 11. The Kindles all use US type WiFi adapters.

donaghs

My first thought is that your computer hardware doesn't support WPA2. Although its rare that a PC released when Vista was available woudnt support this. Can you rule this out? (e.g did you manually install Vista onto older hardware?)

I have used W7, Vista, XP and Ubuntu successfully with my UPC broadband on WPA and WPA2, so can't assume immediatly that Vista is the problem.

Capt'n Midnight

donaghs wrote: »

My first thought is that your computer hardware doesn't support WPA2.

interesting, easiest way to test would be to borrow a USB wifi thingy.

Iwannahurl

I have a wireless connection from my PC to UPC broadband.

OS is Vista Home Premium.

Security type is WPA-Personal.

Encryption type is AES.

All working fine.

IIRC the network key can be a cause of connection problems.

I'm far from being a Techie, so apologies if the above is too Noddy-level.

caesar2

Still using a Toshiba Satellite L30 Laptop. Was given a new router by Eircom and this worked fine on new Desktop but not laptop.

On Laptop Network connection was coming up as local access only.

Heres what I did to get it working. My operating system is Vista Home Premium.

Using security settings WPA2 Personal and AES.

BTW The site referred to above --Atheros.cz was only showing few lines text and nothing else. .So did not see anything to download. turned off adblocker for site to no avail. And any other drivers from other sites I tried did not work .

Until I found the following: world wide web pcworld.pl/ftp/pobierz/pc/41151 - Its in Polish, but you obviously click on the 'Pobierz' button to download.

Deleted athr.sys in C\windows\system32\drivers and replaced it with the new version downloaded from above site. rebooted laptop and internet connection restored !!!

One thing I'm bothered about is how the Registery is affected. My laptop crashed after several months when I did this first for the first time last year. I just spent a lot of hours figuring out how to repeat the process and its working again. Did not do a backup at the time.

Would be glad if anyone more knowledgeable has comment on registery or what to do with security file in that download. I'm content that laptop can again access the internet.

FanadMan

caesar2 wrote: »

Still using a Toshiba Satellite L30 Laptop. Was given a new router by Eircom and this worked fine on new Desktop but not laptop.

On Laptop Network connection was coming up as local access only.

Heres what I did to get it working. My operating system is Vista Home Premium.

Using security settings WPA2 Personal and AES.

BTW The site referred to above --Atheros.cz was only showing few lines text and nothing else. .So did not see anything to download. turned off adblocker for site to no avail. And any other drivers from other sites I tried did not work .

Until I found the following: world wide web pcworld.pl/ftp/pobierz/pc/41151 - Its in Polish, but you obviously click on the 'Pobierz' button to download.

Deleted athr.sys in C\windows\system32\drivers and replaced it with the new version downloaded from above site. rebooted laptop and internet connection restored !!!

One thing I'm bothered about is how the Registery is affected. My laptop crashed after several months when I did this first for the first time last year. I just spent a lot of hours figuring out how to repeat the process and its working again. Did not do a backup at the time.

Would be glad if anyone more knowledgeable has comment on registery or what to do with security file in that download. I'm content that laptop can again access the internet.

You're about four and a half years late on your answer

caesar2

Yes, thank you very much for your considered reply.