Hi all,

My buddy has an old Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop which he wants to make wifi compatible, but we have had no luck so far. We have even done a clean reinstall of XP on it.

It is using a Linksys AE1000 USB wireless adapter that recognizes my wireless router (5 bars of reception). When my password is entered, it tries to connect but is unable to do so.

Any ideas? I'm baffled since everything seems to be in order. The only hardware error that shows up in Device Manager is in connection with the modem, but since we aren't using dial-up, we figured that wasn't pertinent to our problem.

Thanks.

 

are you using the linksys program to authenticate, or windows to handle the network connection
personally i have a bit of problems with the usb version of wifi logging on on to the connection, especially if the router is not another linksys product

and do you have it set to WEP or WPA?

do you use vista? if you are under vista you'll need to disable DHCP broadcast flag

Windows 7 and XP do not have this issues

Windows Vista cannot obtain an IP address from certain routers or from certain non-Microsoft DHCP servers

 

@mikerios - Thanks for the heads up about possible USB problems!
I have used several other laptops (3 Dells, 1 Acer & 1 HP) with no problem, but all of them with the exception of this one had internal wifi cards. And here is the kicker ... I tried installing the USB wifi adapter on a spare Dell desktop that I have laying around and it worked fine there. The current router is an Actiontec provided by Verizon and uses a WEP security setting. It currently works fine with an HP (with XP installed) and a Dell (with Vista installed).
I'm beginning to wonder if there may be some sort of incompatibility due to the age of this particular Dell laptop.
I'll be checking into the link you provided.

Thanks.

 

here is the kicker
I am on FIOS
have the actiontec router
have the linksys PCI adapter wifi g
but it only works on WEP
not WPA
so i set up my spare linksys router
and enabled that wifi
that one worked fine with WEP, but a no go with WPA
so the Actiontec i set to WPA, the linksys to WEP

I also had issues with the linksys program
and decided to let windows networking handle it instead

but i also had the linksys USB wifi adapter
and took it back due to intermitant connectivity issues with it

now i have 3 laptops
all of them have internal wifi
all of them use WPA to connect with no issues
it was my 4th computer that i had remote that could't connect reliably with a usb adapter, until i went the pci route.