Hello all,

I have an Inspiron 6400 Laptop running Win Vista Home Premium.

Recently I had cause to change my home wireless router from an ancient Safecom to a brand new Belkin F5D8233. The laptop worked fine with the old router but now will connect with only "Access: Local Only" - which actually means it can't even connect to the local network!   (About 1 in 10 times it will connect properly and give full Internet access).

I have been tearing my hair out over this one.

I have googled myself to death and have tried all of the following:

• I have tried disabling IPv6
• I have updated the firmware on the router
• I have tried changing the DHCP Broadcast flag setting in the registry (by following the article at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233)
• A bunch of other stuff...

All to no avail.

If anyone knows anything else to try please let me know.

The last remaining thing I could think of was to update the wireless card driver on the Dell. With this in mind I went to the Dell support drivers page. I put in my service tag (which now no longer works - so I selected the product manually) and sure enough there is an update for the wireless 1390 WLAN mini card.

Being careful to select Windows Vista 32bit as the OS I downloaded the driver. It gave me a file called "Dell_multi-device_A17_R174292.exe" On unpacking and running this file I was a bit surprised to find an information screen which listed all the machines that this update was applicable to that did NOT include the Inspiron 6400 - but I carried on anyway. It starts the Install Shield which thinks about it for a while and then aborts with the message "The operating system is not supported. The software will not be installed. Setup will now exit."

Has Dell put the wrong driver on the website?

Can anyone help me out with this?

Will updating the driver (if it is possible to find the right file) solve the above problem?

 

The machine is now out of warranty and I don't fancy spending a significant part of my life talking to a call centre in India speaking to someone reading from a script, so I would really appreciate any  help and suggestions!

 

Thanks in advance

 

Mark