WiFI confusion

RenegadeT

RenegadeT

no shirt,no shoes,no dice
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Mar 24, 2005
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Stokesdale-Greensboro
I am the system admin @ my house, but only know enough to thoroughly screw some stuff up. Something's up with wifi access on my laptop, an IBM Thinkpad T42 with Windows XP. I have Time Warner RR-Lite running thru a pretty old 802.11g Netgear router.
What happens is the laptop is always 'Aquiring network address'. Sometimes I have good 54Mbps access, with strong signal, but sometimes the signal says Limited to No Connectivity. Rebooting the cable modem and router doenst change anything.
All this occurs, and my wife is fine surfing the web on her laptop (Dell with Windows 7).
Even when I plug the network cable between my laptop and router, it is 'Aquiring network address', but gives 100Mbps.

One more piece of info on my old POS laptop. I have no idea where the wifi radio antenna is. One of the hinges to the monitor is broken, and I can see the wiring going between the computer and monitor. The ribbon cable looks good, but there are 2 other wires in bad shape; a black one is cut and a white one is severely frayed.

Whats the deal with IP address...why's m computer always aquiring one, and how come I am able to connect without it?
 
No real professional knowledge here, my old laptop used to do that all the time, wanted to be restarted any and every time I used it, but then would work fine again until I shut it off or hibernated. It would say "Local Only" almost all the time, I restart, and it would be fine.
 
Tony,

In the Thinkpads, the antenna is in the screen, on the left side, running up beside the screen. On my T400 the frame is just a little wider on that side, makes it look a little funny b/c the screen surface isn't perfectly centered.
My bet is that one of those wires (frayed one?) is your problem. It's probably losing teh connection to the antenna and thus losing teh signal, spending all that time tryin gto find something.

If you feel really bold, TPs are pretty modular. not familiar w/ the build on T42s, but I'd bet it's pretty easy to get the chassis apart and find where those wires connect to... it's likely an add-on card that is the WiFi module.

You will have an IP address any time it's connected, there's just no way around that.
Any time it is "working", go to the command line, type "cmd" to get into DOS, then "ipconfig". it wil ltel lyou what the IP is. Do the same when it's "searching" and it will probably say "media disconnected".
 
The black and white cabled are your antenna wires. I would reccomend to fix the hinge and replace the wires, but if you want to go cheap just buy a PCMCIA wireless card and disable the built in card.
 
Uh yeah, what he said.
 
I understand a little of this, but not enough to figger it out. I plugged the wireless card in, but it had to d'load software...that required me to connect the LAN cable for internet. Then the card is still not working, seems like the IBM wireless softwear is overiding the MS-XP stuff, and not letting the card function. Dunno what else to do, deal with it later, I am not wireless now though.
 
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