I’ve just bought a couple of new laptops at work  - a Dell Latitude D531 and a Dell Vostro 1310.

I tried to connect them to the wireless access point in the office, and although they would connect it was with ‘limited connectivity’, which meant that they couldn’t access the internet and pinging anything gave a fail message. I tried an older laptop running Vista, and that seems to have developed the same problem although it used to access wireless without problems.

I then tried an XP laptop, and that connects without problems and can access the internet and the servers. Having narrowed it down this far, I tried uninstalling the most recent lot of windows updates from the older Vista machine to see if that worked – it didn’t.

I then tried updating the firmware on the wireless access point. This meant that I had to reconfigure it from scratch, and once I’d done this I checked that the XP computer could still access it and connect to the web and servers, which it could. The vista ones, however, still showed the same problem.

I also tried wired connections to the two new laptops. This worked with the D531 but not with the 1310, which showed exactly the same symptoms as when connected wirelessly. I tried taking it elsewhere in the building and connecting it, but that made no difference.

There was some preinstalled junk on the 1310 and I wondered whether Dell had made some strange configuration settings. I therefore wiped the hard drive and did a clean installation of Vista plus drivers. Exactly the same problems persisted.

I wondered whether it was a hardware fault with this laptop, so I took it home and tried connecting it to my router. It immediately picked up the internet when connected both by wire and by wireless, and gave no problems at all – so it isn’t a hardware fault.