laptop suddenly won't connect to the internet

Networking, connecting to the internet, wi-fi and home entertainment
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stuck
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laptop suddenly won't connect to the internet

Post by stuck »

stuckling1 is home. Before we sat down for a meal his laptop was fine. It connected to the router and he could surf the web. Now it won't.

So far we've tried:
rebooting
turning off and on again the wireless network on the laptop
deleting and remaking the wireless network connection.
No. change though. Laptop says it's connected but only locally.

We've also logged into the router but it does NOT show the laptop as an attached device.

Meanwhile, my netbook and stuckling2's laptop still happily connect to the outside world.

Any clues?

Ken

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BobH
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Re: laptop suddenly won't connect to the internet

Post by BobH »

Did you try powering the router and cable modem off then reconnecting them to the mains? I have to do this quite often. When you reconnect, do the cable modem first and let it complete its POST (power on self-test) before reconnecting the router. After the router completes its POST, try reconnecting devices to the network. IIRC I had to do this once when I could connect but 'er indoors could not.

There is also the possibility that the wifi adapter in Stuckling's laptop failed, but I don't know how to test that except for him to try logging in to a different network or hotspot.
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stuck
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Re: laptop suddenly won't connect to the internet

Post by stuck »

BobH wrote:...for him to try logging in to a different network or hotspot.
We've just done that, using his phone to create a local hotspot. The laptop can reach the outside world using that route.

Which makes this issue very odd...

One more thing to report, when a web page fails to load and we click on the diagnose problems button it eventually says:
Cannot communicate with Primary DNS Server (fe80::19f2:39cd:b049:ae41%8)

We've not messed with the DNS, we were enjoying a meal.

Ken

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stuck
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Re: laptop suddenly won't connect to the internet

Post by stuck »

Hmm,

We've 'fixed' the problem by logging into the router and assigning a fixed IP address to the laptop.

:shrug:

Ken

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BobH
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Re: laptop suddenly won't connect to the internet

Post by BobH »

:shrug:
Bob's yer Uncle
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Intel Core i5, 3570K, 3.40 GHz, 16 GB RAM, ECS Z77 H2-A3 Mobo, Windows 10 >HPE 64-bit, MS Office 2016

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PaulB
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Re: laptop suddenly won't connect to the internet

Post by PaulB »

I have no idea if this has anything to do with it, but is an IPv6 address for that Primary DNS server correct?
Regards,
Paul

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stuck
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Re: laptop suddenly won't connect to the internet

Post by stuck »

PaulB wrote:...is an IPv6 address for that Primary DNS server correct?
No idea either but as I explained, we didn't touch anything between everything being OK and it not working. All was well, dinner was ready so we all sat down and enjoyed it. He then returned to his now sleeping laptop, moved the mouse, it woke up but wouldn't connect to the outside world. Every other device we tried was still able to surf the web.

Obviously something did change while we we're eating / the laptop went to sleep but it was nobody in our house that did anything. And how come the change only affected that one device? It runs Vista but the ancient XPMCE desktop still worked, as did a Win 7 Starter Ed netbook, a Win 7 HP laptop and two Android phones (I didn't get as far as booting the Win 98 SE laptop to see how that behaved :grin: )

The fix of making the router give it a fixed IP address is still working this morning so on the grounds it is no longer broke I'm not going to try and fix it again.

Ken

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Claude
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Re: laptop suddenly won't connect to the internet

Post by Claude »

There's probably a duplicate IP address on your network somewhere, where a device has gone to sleep, releasing the IP address, then, upon waking up, finding out another device grabbed that address. Happens to us from time to time and the easiest way to solve the problem, without rebooting, I've found is to turn the wifi functionality off, wait for the TTL to expire and then restart the wifi.
Cheers, Claude.

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stuck
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Re: laptop suddenly won't connect to the internet

Post by stuck »

Thank you Claude but there was no need to illustrate the problems of duplication by posting the same message twice :evilgrin: edited as the duplicate has disappeared now.

Perhaps what happened was, as you said, s1's laptop released it's IP address when it went to sleep and then, after our meal, his brother's laptop was woken up and got that address first. I can see that would be a problem but in all the years we've had this home network we've never seen this before.

Ken

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HansV
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Re: laptop suddenly won't connect to the internet

Post by HansV »

Sorry, Ken, I noticed the duplicate post and removed it... :sorry:
Best wishes,
Hans