Wireless network problem

[oboe]

I'm sure some of you have played around with a wireless adapter card and a laptop to use at at a local library or coffee shop's wireless access point.

I tried it tonight, and though I was able to get a connection to their wireless network (signal quality and strength in the 80-90% range according to D-Link's utility pgm), I couldn't get IE to find any websites.

I tried doing an IPCONFIG /renew and it would time out saying it was unable to contact the DHCP server.   The coffee shop help person wasn't much help - he just had my try pinging a site but I knew that wouldn't work if I couldn't get an IP address.

So is their some setting I need to change in WinXP to get an Internet connex?   Some security setting or something unique to wireless networks?   I can connect fine with this laptop when I plug it into my router at home....

Thanks in advance for your help!

[ALF]

While stuff like this can be almost anything and bring hard core techies to their knees....make sure a few things:

be sure you dont have encryption on or that it matches theirs

be sure your actually connecting to their network (check the wireless ID) and not someone else who is encrypted

Zone alarm?

Is it free or do they need to add your mac address to give you access

about a bizzilion more, but those are my common pitfalls

[bloom25]

Your problem was either that an IP address was not assigned to your computer, and/or DNS server addresses were not assigned.

You should first check to see that your computer is set to obtain DNS and IP address information automatically under TCP/IP properties for your wireless network card.  You can run ipconfig /all from the cmd window to see if you sucessfully received an IP and DNS server addresses.  If you didn't get DNS addresses you can usually just use some publically available DNS server on the web.  I have a list of some good ones at work that I use when all else fails.  If you didn't get an IP address that probably means there is a DHCP server issue.  If you can find out what a valid IP address is on their network (say 192.168.1.101) you can try manually setting your computer to something like 192.168.1.105.