When hooking up an automotive scan tool to a Windows 7 machine, the tool receives a 169.254.x.x ip address. After being hooked up for a few minutes, the tool loses connection to the windows 7 pc and receives a new 169.254.x.x ip address. After a few minutes the tool will change ip address again. Under windows xp pro the tool never did this. It stayed connected. This happens both wired to the nic card or wireless. The laptop is a Dell e5510 series using w7 pro. I have been told by a network expert that w7 doesn't recognize the 169.254.x.x address block. Can I make it accept the address? Thanks in advance. Harold.

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Vegan Fanatic, MVP: Developer, Windows IT, Chess, Economics, Hardcore Games, Vegan Advocate, PC reviews... ...and totally sodding unhelpful answering questions, if not condescending and downright rude. HTBerry, the 169.254.x.x address means that no connection is made between the devices. You either have to set up an ad hoc, i.e. peer to peer network (which might have been the case with your laptop running XP) or connect via a router, so that DHCP can assign proper IP addresses. Good luck with this. It is not as hard to fix as it might seem at first glance, but more information is needed, if you ask in these forums. Kind regards, DK

Won't work for us. The laptop hooks to an Automotive diagnostic tool. It would be impossible for it to communicate during a road test. Harold.Harold Berry

When we use the scan tool connected wirelessly we do use ad-hoc. But the windows 7 machine drops the connection. The pc also drops connection when wired. If I set the scan tool and the laptop with a static ip then I don't have the problem. However, then the unit can only talk to the scan tool. If our customer needs to get the laptop on the internet it becomes a problem. Not all of the garages have wireless access. I have set up about 100 of these on wxp without any problems. The problem of the lost connection started with W7. There must be something different about W7 that doesn't accept the 169.254.x.x address. At least that is what I was told by a network expert. He is the one that recommended I submit the problem to this forum. He is not a W7 tech. Harold Harold Berry

Let's clarify a few of things here; feel free to correct me if I'm reading this wrong but: Windows and the scan tool do connect, but then the connection is lost after a few minutes. The scan tool then assigns itself a new address. Does the Windows machine do this as well? It works fine if you use a static address on both devices. This is fine for the scan tool, but would cause issues if the laptop is ever needed to connect to a different network. ~ It sounds like Windows isn't having a problem with the address but rather there's a connection issue somewhere. Can we make the basic assumption that you've already tried the latest network drivers for the laptop? (Not the ones from Dell, but rather the ones from the chipset mfg's site.) If so, you might try this: Go to Start Orb->Control Panel->Network and Sharing Center->Change adapter settings. Right-click on your connection and select Properties. Select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and click the Properties button. Click the Alternate Configuration tab. Enter your static IP information here and click OK. Click Close. Do this for both the wired and wireless connections. This should allow the adapters to receive an address from DHCP when needed (as for an Internet connection) but allow it to also communicate over the private, static address when connected to the scan tool. Don't forget to set a static address in the scan tool as well.

answer this >>This scan tool device has USB & is thr any CD/DVD come alone with this tool to configure it in network?

No USB connectivity. CD only has the desktop client software. No network configuration available. Harold Berry

Your solution works. I am able to access either the scan tool or the internet. Thanks. Harold Berry

Whose solution? You were given several possible ones and it'd be nice to know what worked and what didn't.

Sorry. Bob Reese's solution to use the Alternate Configuration tab worked. I was hoping there was a windows registry fix that wouldn't require a static IP but at least now we have something we can use. Harold.Harold Berry