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Gateway not picking up Airport

Scotty:

I hope you are well. My father in law is here visiting and has a gateway laptop. He's trying to sign onto our wireless system and keeps getting a message "Aquiring Network Access" and it wo't go any further. We've got plenty of wireless signal and wife can make her laptop work thoughout the house. Any idea what this might be?

Answer: Gateway. Ugh. There’s a very good chance that your encryption method may not be supported by his current version of his WinXP. I believe that service pack 2 was when Windows first started supporting WPA encryption. That was a long time ago but sometimes you’ll find a computer or two that has not run updates. So that’s thought number one. Run his Windows updates by either connecting directly to ethernet or disabling security on your router for the time being. You could also choose WEP encryption while he’s there but WEP is very 1990’s so you’ll want to get back to WPA eventually.

Next suggestion: be sure you don’t have MAC address filtering turned on. There’s almost 0% chance you do but always just a thought. That can be found in your airport utility. See Below...


Lastly, the more common problem is that Windows is fighting with a 3rd party piece of software to control the wireless card. I see this all the time. HP will have embedded a piece of software to control the card since they manufactured the computer whereas the better way to go is just let Windows control the wireless card. It’s a battle I don’t like to fight because the 3rd party software sometimes comes back to life to retake control. It’s windows. Ugh.

Most likely, however, the best answer is to just turn off security on your network for now. Hope this helps.

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