I was at a friends house last weekend. I found a very interesting problem with Windows 7. They had a laptop they just purchased in Taiwan, and no matter how they tried to connect it to their network, it would always say “Identifying Network”:
Now, in the screen shot it is the wireless network, but this was happening with a direct connection to the router as well.
After some digging and poking at the machine I determined that it was not picking up an IP address from DHCP. It turns out that this is actually an issue in Vista too.
Microsoft has a soloution: KB928233. In short the fix is to set a registry key. There are actually two different registry keys.
One of them allows you to try the current method (But broken with older routers), and if it fails it will try the old way:
DhcpConnEnableBcastFlagToggle
The other key allows you to bypass this entirely and totally switch back to the old XP way:
DhcpConnForceBroadcastFlag
Both of them are under the GUID of the network card in this registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\{GUID}
Neither of them solved my problem. I tried for quite some time different tricks to get Windows 7 to pickup an IP address from this old router with no success.
The final solution was to give the laptop a static IP address. Not the best, but at least he could get on the net.
The question is, have you ever seen this problem with Windows 7, or Vista? If so, how did you finally get it to work?
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Steve,
Great post. I had this exact problem when I visit my parents place. I just tried your fix, and it does now work. Question: Is it an older Linksys 54 G Router? That is the one I have the problem with.
Yes it is a Linksys router. I am not sure of the model. I will have to take a peek the next time I have a chance.
I had this problem too. My fix was to throw out the old router and get a new one. I guess that is what they call progress
Sometimes a simple solution to Windows networking issues like this is to give a device a static IP address, establish the networking connection and then switch back to a dynamic one. This almost always works after the devices have established communication via the static IP.
I emailed a fix that had worked for me. Did this help you?
I thought you were joking about your fix. Adding all of the guest accounts to the “Administrators” group ain’t going to fix the problem.
“I thought you were joking about your fix. Adding all of the guest accounts to the “Administrators” group ain’t going to fix the problem.”
Rofl, he must work for DELL.
That was crazy, haven’t seen that problem before but due to various issues over the years with my own home networking in terms of getting all my devices to always be able to see/talk to each other I’ve taken to given them static ip’s as a default.
Microsoft have created an utility to diagnose whether a router is compatible with Windows. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932134