Member Avatar for boherb

I have a home network with an ATT router and maybe 10 devices on it. One device, a dell latitude laptop running Windows XP is the issue here. This PC has always connected to the wireless network just fine, but today will not. I have worked with ATT, no help at all, but have gathered the following.

  • my laptop IP address is 169.254.xxx.xx. This IP address does not change when I reboot, and does not change when I do ipconfig/releanse, or renew, or when I do a dnsflush. (I dont know what these are, the ATT guys had me do them).
  • the router is not seeing this IP address. It assignes 192. ip addrsses to all other devices. I am almost sure that used to be the ip range for this laptop as well.

To a layperson, it seems that the router cannot assign an ip to this laptop, and does not recognize the one it has.

  • when I open network connections, it says signal strength excellent, but also "limited or no connectivity". The message also says "This problem occurred because the network did not assign a network address to the computer".

  • Yesterday, I did a ccleaner where I deleted a couple of programs (an ATT toolbar, a printer software thing, and I think that is it, but I must have done something to cause this laptop to suddenly not connect after 9 months of flawless performance.

  • I did a system restore to take me to a state before I did the ccleaner, but I dont think that helps with removed programs (if that is even the issue). I have also looked in my recycle hoping to find something there to reinstall, but nothing.

I am sorry if this is poorly worded. I am not a technical person, and am at a loss. Att said to take it to Office Depot. I am hoping someone here might have better advice, and can get me out of a mess I am sure I created.

Thank you for any responses.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by vbalag
Member Avatar for JorgeM

You are on track with your analysis. The 169.254.x.x address is an APIPA address. Without getting into the technical details, a Windows system will self assign itself an ip in this range when it is unable to negotiate an address with your router.

You could try applying a static ip address to see if that works for the time being. Here is a video tutorial I have on YouTube regarding TCP/IP configuration on XP. The concept is the same for other Win versions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_drzbZcJSc

You may be able to resolve this by uninstalling the network adapter in device manager and letting windows rescan and reinstall it. This procedure fixes flaky issue.

Member Avatar for vbalag
  1. try with static ip first and c if it works,
  2. put the lan into auto ip mode and then you can reset the ip of the pc with
    netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt command in cmd prompt with admin rights. unplug and plug in the lan cable from the pc

Hope this helps

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