Starfish,

 

I am not sure about the Wireless Card in your system or Operating system to provide a more specfic answer.

 

However, you can enable the Wireless card by either pressing Fn + F2 key combination on the keyboard or by opening the Wireless card control utility ( somewhat like Intel Proset utility or Dell Wireless Network utility ) where in you will find an button which says "Turn Wireless On" etc. If you could provide me the details of the Wireless card & the operating system I can look for a more specific answer. However, You should try the Fn + F2 combination first. Most likely to fix your issue.

 

Best of luck in enabling your Wireless card :)

 

Regards,

Dinesh

 

P.S : I dont think a OS reinstall would be needed for this issue at this stage.

Hi Dinesh!

 

Thank you Thank you Thank you!  I want to send you flowers, my boyfriend wants to send you beer to express our gratitude!  :smileyvery-happy:  Who knew the answer could be so simple (and why could my company's IT dept not figure it out, and when I called Dell customer service they could not either?)  geesh.

 

Now, we have a part 2 of this problem though.  The wireless is now enabled, and it's picking up the signal of our router.  But - we cannot get a homepage/webpage when we open either Explorer or Firefox :smileysad:  What could be the cause of it?  How can we fix this?  My bf thinks the problem may be that the computer seems to be trying to use a connection called 1394 instead of the connection it used to use.  This 1394 connection has only recently appeared (maybe when I brought the computer to my conference and dinked around with it while trying to connect?)  How do we get rid of it?  I don't think disabling it worked.

 

Thanks again!  I'm looking forward to your reply!

starfish

For IE7 (internet Explorer 7) go to tools, internet options window will pop-up click on the general tab it should be allready on this as it opens and Home Page will be at the top of the page type your address in there click ok. Now everytime a webpage opens you will have the chosen webpage as your homepage.

 

Firefox is the same Tools, Options, Main tab type you chosen homepage in the address bar click ok when done.

Starfish,

 

Glad to know you have your wireless card working again !

 

Are there other systems on connected to the Wireless router and are they able to go online. If not, I would suggest you to power cycle all the devices as a first step - In order to do this, Power off all your devices like your modem, router, computer. Leave them powered off for 5 mins. Then power on the modem first, wait for the lights to stabilize, then power on the router & then the computer. Check if your able to go online.

 

I am assuming the operating system is Windows XP. I am also assuming you get a Page cannot be displayed error. If it is just that the homepage is not set correctly, the previous post should suffice.

 

Since your boyfriend suspects the 1394 connection - check if a network bridge has been created. For this, Click Start, Click My Network places, Click View Network connections ( located under Network Tasks ). Here check if there is anything named like Network Bridge. If so, right click on it and Click delete in order to get rid of the network bridge. Else you can disable the 1394 connection by right clicking on it and clicking on Disable.

 

Also, here is a link from the DELL support site which says how to troubleshoot your Wireless network.

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&docid=1A2C07695AB81246E0401E0A55176D6D

 

But I feel doing a power cycle and deleteing the network bridge ( if it has been created ) should resolve your issue.....Happy troubleshooting :smileyhappy:

 

Regards,

Dinesh

Hi Inspiron - thank you for your help, unfortunately, our problem is bigger than setting a homepage preference

 

Dinesh - thank you for such detailed solutions.  You're right - our op system is XP, and we're getting a "page cannot be displayed error".  I'll bring your info home with me tonight, and we'll give it a go. 

 

We tried the power cycle last night, and that didn't seem to help.  So now we'll follow your instructions on deleting the network bridge for 1394, although I think my bf did try right clicking on it and choosing disable, but it wouldn't allow him to.  He seems to think that the op system is using 1394 connection first instead of our original connection (before I messed it up) and since that connection isn't any good, it's hindering us from getting any webpages to display.

 

I've also printed out the Dell pages you linked me to. 

 

Do you think the fact that sometimes when we've tried to fix this, a message pops up saying we are not authorized because we don't have administrator status is related?  If so, we don't know how to change this, as we never set up the computer to have administrator status.

 

starfish

Starfish,

 

To check your account type, Click on Start->Control Panel->User Accounts. All your user accounts will be listed there with their type - Either Administrator or Limited User. You can determine the type of User account from here. However, if your listed there as a Limited User, you need to log into one of the Administrator account to change it....but we will leave that for later.

 

With regard to your boyfriend being unable to disable the 1394, this seems typical wherein a Network bridge has been created. Look for a network bridge under Network connections and right click and choose "Delete". Hopefully that should resolve your issue and you should be able to go online. Here is an article which tells you how to delete a network bridge :

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?c=us&l=en&s=gen&docid=82349E5807DA47E8B5B30C93FA5C4294&cs=#1

 

If you do not have a network bridge listed, then please let me know what you get when you do the following steps.

 

Click Start. Click Run. Type CMD in the Open box.

A Black window would open.

Type IPCONFIG

Let me know the kind of IP address you get, Something like 192.168.1.2 etc and the Default Gateway that is listed.

 

Type PING www.google.com

 

Let me know what it says for packets sent and packets received.

 

But am hoping it would just be a network bridge issue....sure would save you lot of trouble shooting :smileywink:

 

Regards,

Dinesh

I want to jump in here real quick and mention something that I think is going on that may help. Since you've removed the profiles it is my suspicion that you have some type of encryption on the router. You might need to enter an encryption in order to connect. Also, the message you are getting about not having permission might be coming from you firewall. For the purposes of testing turn the firewall off and see if you can connect. Please do not leave it off, only turn if off for testig, if you can get on then you need to reconfigure the firewall settings.

Gina - Right. Quite possible.

 

Starfish - I had assumed you had connected to the Wireless network when your card picked up the signal. Do check and let us know if you were able to connect to your network and did it come up with a Pop up like Connected to , Signal strength Excellent, IP address 192.168.x.x etc.

 

Regards,

Dinesh

OH!  I think I understand.  yes - we do have our router encrypted to prevent others from using it.  Do you mean that since we disabled our connection and have now re-enbled it, we've used our own encryption against ourselves?  If so = LOL!  :smileyvery-happy: 

 

I'll check with my bf to see if he's tryed disabling the encryption (maybe he already did, and I just didn't realize it)

 

BTW - we have a Linksys router.

 

starfish

It will be difficult to help with the encryption since you do not tell us what type of router you own. But here are the basics and you can find out more from the Wireless Networking site.

 

Basically you will have high speed internet in your home your ISP will provide a modem (Cable or DSL). You will hook this to the router. The router then sends out the signal. That signal can be encrypted. If you have encrypted your wireless signal then you will not be able to get on the router. Therefore you will need to log into the router and disable the encryption and get online. Many times you will see the wireless signal bars at the bottom and it will show a good signal but if the signal is encrypted you will not be able to get online. If you do not have a router then you are trying to access someone else's and perhaps they have it encrypted. You can tell if the signal is encrypted by looking at the list of wireless networks and if there is a pad lock then it is encrypted. Also, you do not want to access wireless networks that you do not have permission to access.

 

Edit: Oh and you don't need to disable the 1394 this is your "firewire" connection for video and other multimedia transfers.

Hi Gina & Dinesh!  Thank you so much for all of this troubleshooting.

 

We were finally able to disable 1394 connection last night.  But that didn't help :smileysad:

We did PING, and all looks fine

We do see that there's an IP address, and the signal strength is excellent

 

In simplest terms, everything is working....the wireless is connecting to the router and the cable modem is sending/receiving the signal.  But - we can't get a webpage to open.  When we click on our browser icon (Firefox) to open, a screen does open up that has the framework (borders/toolbars) of a webpage, but it's otherwise just a grey screen with an error message that says "msn.com cannot be found, please check your connection and try again later" or something like that (this happens on any webpage we try)

 

Gina - we don't have a firewall (according to my bf) so there's nothing to turn off?  I'm not sure I understand what you mean about the encryption reference.  What do we do with regards to this?

 

starfish

Hi everyone!  I hope you had a great weekend :smileyvery-happy:

 

We did, except........we still cannot view internet pages.

We're connected, we just can't view them.  Gina - I don't know how far my boyfriend got into removing the encryption from the router.  I know he tried, but he's extremely frustrated with this whole ordeal!  I do know, that he swears that the router is fine, the cable modem is fine, and they're all working and we're connected.  He's resign in stating that the computer is the problem?

Any more ideas?

Thanks!
starfish

Thank you Gina!  We're also going to try the Freeware WinSock Fix (I saw another thread here where the member's problem was similiar, and this was recommended to her and it worked)

 

I hope to have a good report tomorrow!  :smileyhappy:

starfish

:smileymad:  Winsock XP Fix didn't work!

 

And we reset the router, and that didn't help either.

 

I just don't get it.  All of the equipment works.  We're connected to the internet.  No firewalls, no encryption.  But - we're not able to view pages.  This is crazy!!!

 

Any other ideas????