by Scott Ross

Created on: July 08, 2008   Last Updated: July 10, 2008

One of the most common things that occurs is the issues that involve wireless internet. These issues can be fixed by some very simple fixes. Due to the nature of wireless it can be hard to narrow down what causes these errors to come up at various times.

For any reason when there is any issues with wireless sometimes a simple reboot is more than enough to fix most of the basic issues that come up. Most of the time that alone will fix an issue that wasn't present the day before. The cause of this fix is random and the reason it works may simply be because the connection wasn't able to be fully setup.

Another basic and simple fix that I will typically try is to have the user right click on the wireless connection and go to repair, in vista, repair and diagnose. In some cases the reason for this fix comes up due to an IP conflict or due to improper DHCP assignment.

In the event that neither of these two events fixes the issues the next most prevalent problem is an issue with either the driver or the wireless card itself. For this a user needs to go to Start, Right click on My computer, in XP or Computer in Vista, go to properties, In XP a window comes up that says "System Properties" at the top, in Vista it brings up a different window which simply shows the system items on the window with a bar on the left that has various options on it. In XP the user then needs to click hardware and then device manager to pull up the device manager for the computer, in Vista the window that comes up will have Device manager in the left bar and the user simply needs to click on the link for device manager. For both operating systems the next steps are essentially the exact same. Here in order to check the device to ensure it is working properly the user needs to go to Network adapter. NOTE: if you see a red X or a Yellow Exclamation mark next to any device there are some sort of issue going on with the device, if you see a red X the reason may simply be that the device has been disabled, just enable it if it happens to be the wireless card with which you are having issues with. If you see a Yellow Exclamation mark then there is some issue going on, perhaps in most cases if it was working the best way to resolve this is to uninstall the device and reinstall it upon reboot. IF however there is a Yellow Question mark then the device isn't installed on the PC, simply install the device on the computer.

These three fixes that I have suggested typically will fix most of the basic issues. If you still have issues with wireless after trying these issues ensure that you have the correct WEP key put into the computer, or contact the network administrator if it is an opportunity for this.

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