A few days ago I took my laptop to a friend's house, and I tried to connect to his wireless router.I ended up getting local only access and the windows troubleshooter said it could not find www.microsoft.com. However if I typed in the IP address of ANY website it would show up perfectly. My friend and his brother both had internet (XP and Vista) even after reconnecting to the router. I had not touched any of the settings in Windows. I simply chose connect to a network > picked his router > entered the passphrase and set the network location on Private.Both of them used DHCP and so did I, with no proxies enabled. As soon as I got back home my computer found my router and worked perfectly as always.I tried copying the address information from my friend with ipconfig /all (of course with a different IP address) I used one the router had not given out yet. This did not work either...What am I doing wrong here???

Hi,First thing you need to check if you have network connectivity, see you able to ping your router. Once you confirm that try to ping any www address. Ifyou get any replies fine, you can reset your browsers settings by going under tools, internet options, advanced and reset.

Thing is, I never touched my laptop settings and my friends router was untouched too.Both my friend and his brother had internet perfectly, even after reconnecting to the router (Vista and XP).I must say I didn't try to ping the router, and I know I couldn't access it in the web browser. But my laptop's IP showed up in the router as connected.Why would I get no internet and my friend does? After not touching ANY browser settings? I simply turned my laptop off and took it over there, it worked fine as soon as I turned it on at home again.Are there any other things I should know then? Because I don't know when I'll be at my friend's again and I'd like to know the steps beforehand.

Hi, This issue is caused by the DNS settings on your computer. Windows Vista includes a feature called Network Connectivity Status Indicator (NCSI). NCSI is designed to be responsive to network conditions, so it examines the connectivity of a network in a variety of ways. For example, NCSI tests connectivity by trying to connect to http://www.msftncsi.com, a simple Web site that exists only to support the functionality of NCSI. If the DNS of the computer does not work, the name http://www.msftncsi.com cannot be resolved. Therefore, NCSI would consider that Internet is not connected. The following article has explained this behavior. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766017.aspx Generally, on the router we could set DNS server address and all the connected computers use this DNS server. In some situations, we do not set DNS address on the router, but manually configure DNS server address on computers and the DNS still works. I suggest that you run ipconfig /all on all of the computers, and check if they have at least one same DNS server address. If not, we could manually set DNS address. If the DNS address is the same, the issue may be caused by the firewall or anti-virus on your computer. I suggest that you temporary disable them, and then check the result.Arthur Xie - MSFT

Just use nslookup to try resolving URL/domain name, it's DNS problem if it does not resolve the URL/domain name successfully. You can try to configure following free DNS servers (provided by OpenDNS) on computer and test again. 208.67.222.222208.67.220.220 dawooddHome Network, Wireless Network and Computer Networking Made Easy