Laptops are driving me nuts!!!!!!

[steve_nfi]

How can 3 identical laptops with identical builds act completely differently?

I had 3 in class today, none of them would logon to the network initially.

The first one logged on locally and once the wireless had kicked in, connected to the wireless network straight away. This then could log off and back onto the network fine.

The second one logged on locally, the same thing happened as the first but then dropped out and sat there acquiring and address forever more.

The last one logged on locally and couldn't see any wireless networks, although when you passed you curser over the wireless symbol it said that it had an excellent signal from our wireless network.

All laptops have dedicated IP addresses which are reserved in DHCP so no-one else can use them.

They all use the windows wireless facility with windows zero configuration on.

I've tried letting DHCP allocate ip's but it doesn't make any difference.

The wireless seems slow to kick in on these because on most of them, after they have powered up and stood for a minute or 2, logon to the network fine.

Can anyone shed any light on this problem please before I throw half a laptop trolley through the window.

[kmount]

Laptop Make / Model?

 

Latest drivers?

 

Which wifi system?

[rad]

Smartboards for me, how can three the same all suffer similar issues in a small time frame. Grr

[steve_nfi]

Laptop Make / Model?

 

Latest drivers?

 

Which wifi system?

 

Viewsonic Viewbook 130

Latest apparently

Cisco

 

Operating system is XP SP3

Edited March 21, 2011 by steve_nfi
to move answers

[fathead]

Hi there. How are you authenticating on to the wireless network? I had this problem at my new school. The summer before I started they had a third party come in and install an expensive Aerohive System and they left the pieces behind them!

 

Half of the laptops in school would log on locally (so no network drives would map) and then a few minutes later would decide to authenticate. It was causing that much of a headache (all the time, everyday!) I disabled the enterprise login through RADIUS and just setup a Pre-Shared Key login on the wireless network and distributed it to members of staff.

 

Not an ideal solution but I will look at it again in the summer and try to see what was going wrong. Network is vanilla 2k3.

[steve_nfi]

The authentication is via pre shared key (PSK2). These are coded into every laptop so the users don't have to put them in every time. This works for a majority of them but for a few it doesn't despite being set up indentically. We have 2 WLAN's. One for students and one for teachers. The teachers one has more access than the student one. These are stacked so that if it can't find one the it will revert to the other. I've tried swapping from one to the other and this sometimes works with the laptops that drop out after 5 mins but not the ones that don't think they can see any wireless networks.

[chrbb]

I have exactly the same issue 2 or 3 laptops from the same trolley will refuse to connect, I've got 5 buffalo access points with overlapping channels, security set to the lowest WPA security as 2 of the access points are old. I've swopped the access points around in school so the new and old are evenly spaced but I still have problems. If I carry said laptops to another part of school they will connect and stay connected when I take them back to the part of school they wouldn't connect in!