Vista networking problem.....

[blade]

A friend asked me to take a look at his laptop. I've never used Vista, but agreed to take a look. It shows that it's connected to my wireless LAN; however, it can't connect to the internet. The same issues are present when using a wired connection to the network.

I can ping 127.0.0.1 however if I ping "localhost" i get the message "ping request could not find host localhost". If I try to ping ::1 (which if I understand correctly is IPv6) I get "unable to create socket, error code 10047". I can ping my router, websites, etc... without issue if I used the IP address, but not if I type in the name such as google.com. I can't connect to any of them through IE even if I use the IP address.

Under view status of the network connection it states:

IPv4 Connectivity - Internet
IPv6 Connectivity - Limited
Media State - Enabled

I tried Googling the problem and it seems to be a fairly widespread problem, but the possible solutions vary greatly.

My router is a WRT54G, which I read has problems with Vista, but even if my router was incompatible shouldn't I still be able to ping localhost?

I've tried to disable IPv6 by unticking the box in the network settings as well as editing the registry as suggested by Microsoft and neither seemed to have any impact. The status still showed limited connectivity for IPv6 so I don't think it ever actually disabled it.

I've also tried resetting TCP/IP as described here.

Any help would be appreciated. I've been considering upgrading to Windows 7. Should I expect similar network problems with it as well?

[david1234]

at the prompt does "ipconfig /all" return what you expect it to?

It sounds a bit like DNS is not being set right.

[blade]

It's working now though I'm not really sure what the problem was or why it's fixed. I had tried letting Vista repair the connection several times and it kept giving me a message saying that it couldn't repair itself and that I would need to contact my ISP or IT. I finally connected the laptop directly to the cable modem bypassing the router and had Vista attempt to repair the connection and this time it did. I rebooted several times and each time the connection came back so I reconnected the laptop to the router and it seems to be working fine.

I have no idea why Vista couldn't repair the connection when it was connected to the router.

[david1234]

That's odd! Glad it's working for you.