Vista versus Livebox

[studiot]

Brand new Acer laptop with Vista and integral broadcom wireless.

Refused to connect to wanadoo livebox over wireless although network found and signal strength good.

Connected for 5 minutes after turning off security (we/wpa etc) on the livebox.

Then disconnected.

Keeps trying to reconnect, connecting and then disconnecting wthin 2 seconds.

Laptop connected perfectly over ethernet to livebox. Downloaded 80MB of updates and installed. Made no difference to problem.

All the time a nearby XP pc connected perfectly via wireless to livebox and formed network with laptop.

Any suggestions as to what is hitting the laptop?

[lbmest]

(Left field suggestions - I don't know Vista):o
Try safe mode with networking?
Broadcom drivers?
Finicky internal antenna connection?

[studiot]

I don't think it's directly a Vista thing; I've had no trouble connecting a Dell Vista laptop. All the proper Vista dialog boxes come up but the end result is can't connect due to 'unknown causes'.

I did try disabling everything in msconfig, including something in chinese, but after restart Windows Defender suppressed msconfig!!!!!!!!

One of the updates was new broadcom drivers, but that made no difference.

All devices were set to the same channel (7)

I have tried it is various orientations/positions.

Acer have something called 'enet management' on the laptop
This seems to produce the same dialog boxes as windows but in green not blue with the same negative effect.
The instruction manual is about as much use as the roll of paper in my toilet.

[DavidGP]

I found the ACER wireless manager, useless and uninstalled it and used the inbuilt Vista network manager to connect to wireless, I thought the Vista one and ACERs eNet conflicted and was not fully Vista compatible, which led me to thing why the hell did they pre-install it anyway!?

http://support.acer-euro.com/winvist...#_Toc153873066 but maybe an updated eNET maybe, so worth checking for an update to the pre-installed version http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/downloads.html


I have an ACER laptop and Orange broadband, but found Vista's own network management best and its not failed as yet.

[studiot]

Thanks for the response, Halo - It may well turn out to be the helpful extra from Acer.

I've had a look around the net and see lots of requests to solve the same problem, but no answers.

Several people have pointed fingers at the Acer software but disabling / uninstalling it has not helped those who posted.

Interestingly the same problem is reported with other Acer hardware using the Intel wireless hardware.

I am putting in a service query to Acer about this, but I suspect it will not be resolved quickly.

Will keep MG posted.

[studiot]

For those interested I can now connect the laptop successfully to the Livebox.

The fault lies in the Livebox programming, not the laptop, may even have been due to a badly written update.

Wanadoo and Orange users who have Liveboxes have to press the 'pairing' button to allow wifi connection, even though the network is vivible in the pc.
It is a sort of MAC filtering but it doesn't work correctly as pairing will only occure for the length the laptop is connected when wep/wpa is disabled (no security).

If you turn the laptop off and on again you will need to press the pairing button on the Livebox to re-acquire the wifi if the live box is set to no security.

In fact re-acquisition only works (semi)reliably on the wep setting.

The user cannot control the MAC filtering.

[DavidGP]

Great feedback StudioT cheers