A post... could probably benefit from making more of these... O_o*

[silverstarwind]

It's snowing. Again. I guess that should be changed to read, "Still." As it in is always snowing, and it will continue to do so for the rest of our natural lives

Comments

[satyrix]

AT&T's Technical Support is neither. Ya know what test those guys take to get that job? It's two pages and about 20 questions - it starts off with images of the different parts of a system and one has to label the monitor, mouse, keypad, etcetera. The toughest question, at the end, was something along the lines of "How do you install a new program?" - and all questions were multiple choice. (I swindled the contractor for AT&T/SBC/Sprint - they all had the same outsource client for tech support - for my A+ training; the program was canceled right after my class got through...)

Okay, what I've got to work with so far: you're on a WPA network, your laptop is loaded with Vista and you're dealing with an AT&T DSL router. Two things stand out: 'Vista' and 'AT&T'.

Amazingly, this time it's not AT&T that's the issue; well, it kinda is, because the conflict lies between the router and Vista - A decent net company would've compensated with modern equipment. Anyway, there's a number of faults this could be... the bottom line, however, is that it's a problem with Vista's basic design.

In a sense, your brother and the AT&T guy are right, as far as that goes. That's the beautiful thing about the classic line "A conflict with the software": it's computer lingo for "I got nothin'", but it covers all software, so if you find a problem? You're automatically right. Still, computers are half hardware, half software, so it's a 50/50 shot.

But I digress. The problem is within your network TCP/IP network stack; it's very probably due to Vista's layering design. *sigh* I suspect it's going to require correcting the Vista registry by hand, which is very delicate work... let's hope that's not it, eh?

Let's try a basic correction first, though:

1) Go to your Control Panel, then to Device Manager.
2) Expand the Network Devices category and then right click on your network adapter.
3) Click 'Properties', then choose the Advanced tab.
4) Go down to TCP Checksum - offload and disable both IPv4 and IPc6.
5) Carefully do the apply and okay dance back out to the desktop and reboot.
6) Avoid prayer, it's a waste of energy, but be hopeful and optimistic.

Let me know what happens; I've got the basic idea of the problem and what's causing it - there's a design structure Microsoft implemented in Vista that can't find what it wants from the AT&T Hardware - but need to pin down the exact mechanism of error, here.

Oh, and do you usually connect on WPA or WEP wireless?

[silverstarwind]

Yeah the tech guy was... um... yeah. In fact, he irritated me more than the actual problem had.

I'll try that later today when I get off work. Is this the sort of thing that will be easy to change back? Or rather... more importantly, will I still be able to connect to other networks that aren't WPA or WEP in the future if I make these changes? Yeah... ok, I just answered my question... if I just follow the steps and turn things back on and whatnot, I should be able to fix it myself. But still, more importantly, will this affect how I connect to other networks?

And, as far I know, I've never actually connected with a WPA or WEP network.