Wireless connection in Vista

[tincaman]

I have come accross a couple of laptops now running Vista that will connect to a wireless router sucessfully either with or without security enabled, but will only give local access to the network, despite the router being online to the net. Other wired or wireless PC's can connect and access the net fine. It only happens with Vista, any ideas?

[streetster]

run the network configuration wizard thing, maybe that'll fix it

or have a look in ie7 settings and make sure its set to 'never dial a connection' / use lan etc

[mrcrazy04]

Sometimes the tray icon and networking control panel will take a while to update and may report that only local access is available when in fact you can access the internet through the browser.
If you can access the router admin web pages from the Vista laptop, then you should be able to access the internet fine.
On my Vista laptop I have found that it can sometimes stop being able to connect to the internet in any web browser, which I think is related to the "6to4" driver (guessing converts IPv6 to IPv4), but a reboot sorts it.

[joshwa]

I've had similar problems on Vista with my netgear wireless usb dongle (and another wireless pci card) - Vista seems utterly useless compared to XP. I get poor to fair signal with Vista, and get Very good signal with the same wireless usb dongle and Windows XP. I think I may as well just wipe Vista off the PC and reinstall Windows XP...

[errata]

When expermenting with Vista I found my router or the wireless card drivers seemed reluctant to get DNS lookup information from the router but would let me access the router via its admin number. maybe try manuallyi assigning the gateway and dns servers see if that helps.

[tincaman]

Problem solved by swapping to a Netgear DG834G, but the old router had nothing wrong with it!