I have a question for the more geek inclined among us.
I'm running a D-Link wireless network at home (802.11g cards and and 802.11b WAP), and XP (both Pro and Home) on three different CPU's. When I installed SP2 on my machine last year, the wireless connection went south. The only fixes I could come up with were to either disable WEP or uninstall SP2.
Bye-bye SP2! WEP isn't the greatest, but all I have to do is make my network less vulnerable than the one my neighbor is running with no encryption. Heh.
Anyhoo...
The gf just bought a new CPU and it's sweet (I'll be blogging about it later on, but for those who can't wait: BTX), and it came with XP Home w/ SP2 pre-installed. Guess what? All we can connect to is the no-encryption neighbor's connection!
Has anyone run across a fix for this apparent SP2/WEP incompatability?
BTW: The first person who tells me to get a fucking Mac will be visited late at night by my rats.
UPDATE: Thank you to those who responded! It seems we have a fix. I contacted the card/router manufacturer (D-Link) and spoke with a tech who was better than most of those I have to deal with (and as Mr. Computer Guy at work, I have to deal with a lot). The fix was to not let Windows configure my wireless network, and to let the D-Link configuration tool do that for me. One minor glitch is it won't connect on power on; the gf has to go into the utility and rescan for all of the available wireless networks, then select ours. After that, it seems to be fine and she can live with that. BTW, we're both running Zone Alarm (I've got the Pro version, she has the freeware version) as well as the hardware firewall on the router.
Next step is to install SP2 on my machine sometime this weekend.
Posted by Victor at January 27, 2005 08:17 PMI seem to recall something about a Winsock fix. I think the fixer proggie is called Winsox?
Posted by Jim at January 27, 2005 09:12 PMVictor,
I know this is a basic question, but did you turn off the new XP firewall that is installed with SP2? We use WEP here at work (and on my home network) and I've not had any issues with SP2.
Posted by Howard at January 28, 2005 07:57 PMI think No One should be using Microsoft's version of a firewall!!! Don't go without a firewall though - bad idea...
At least get Zone Alarm instead! (if you like more control and know what you're doing - get Tiny Firewall) Download, disconnect from the net, disable the Microsoft piece of crap and install the new firewall.
And once again, if you have antivirus software running - disable that too while trying to connect.
With Microsoft it's generally a combination of hardware and software and tons of things being incompatible. No system is ever exactly like another - thus all the headaches. *sigh*
Posted by Teresa at January 28, 2005 10:08 PM