My home network keeps failing

May 12, 2005 5:57 AM

My laptop seems to hate my home network. Every now and again it takes way too long to get from the choose user screen to the actual user desktop. Whenever this happens my LAN settings seem to fly out the window.

I can get everything working again quite quickly by using the home network wizard. The workgroup has always defaulted to mshome, but I'm guessing that's just because it's a new connection.

When it gets up and running, the internet connection is invariably already up and running, so it's successfully triggering the modem dialup but it's not seeing the connection when it gets there.

Any ideas what is happening and how to fix it?

[win xp pro laptop connecting to a group called 'maw' accessing the net through another xp pro machine]

posted by twine42 to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I'm trying to understand what your setup is like, but I'm failing. You're accessing the internet through a modem that is dialing over a phone line into a modem on an XP Pro machine? And this is your home network?

Or by 'modem dialup' do you mean something that doesn't involve a modem or dialing, but instead involves routers and network cables?

Generally, if your computer has a very long delay upon booting and your internet connection goes wonky afterwards, it means that the DHCP server your computer is asking for network information isn't responding. An easy way to check this is to go to a dos prompt (Start -> Run and type cmd), and then run the command ipconfig. If the IP Address shown starts with 169.254, that means XP was unable to poll for an IP address (and with it, all necessary networking config stuff) from the DHCP server.
posted by Jairus at 6:23 AM on May 12, 2005

Erm... sorry. Let me try again...

We have a computer that works as a network gateway. It controls an asdl modem with all network machines having net connection control rights.

The laptop accesses the gateway machine over a standard cat5 10/100 connection.

I assume that the dhcp server would (in this case) be the gateway machine? Or is this an internal server process inside the laptop that has gone wonky and is refusing to see the outside world?
posted by twine42 at 6:33 AM on May 12, 2005

Is the gateway machine using XP's internet connection sharing, or something similar? How is it setup to share internet?
posted by Jairus at 9:59 AM on May 12, 2005

It was just given the modem and told to allow other machines to use and abuse said connection. No 3rd party software, fancy/unobvious toggles or other clever bits.

It's worth noting that the other machine running through the gateway (my wife's desktop) has no such problems.

Cheers for your help here Jairus.
posted by twine42 at 2:54 PM on May 12, 2005

It sounds like a DHCP issue from your gateway machine's end. Can you check the IP address on the laptop (I mentioned how in my first post), and post it here?
posted by Jairus at 6:55 PM on May 12, 2005

I'll get it done tonight. (~10h)
posted by twine42 at 12:50 AM on May 13, 2005