Can't wirelessly connect to UVerse modem/router

Heir

Just moved to a new place. Transferred my AT&T Uverse service from the old place to the new. Wired connection works great...and wireless works fine on my laptop.

However on my desktop, when I click to connect to the network, no prompt appears to have me enter a password. It just tried to connect for a while, then I get the typical "Windows was unable to connect" message.

I'm on Windows 7 Ultimate. Never had issues connecting to wireless networks in the past.

My Ubuntu laptop connects just fine, but i had it configured to use this wireless network at my old place. The desktop used wired at the old place.

Heir

I should add that I can see the wireless network in the list of networks browser. The signal strength shows as excellent. It's just when I click to connect, it tries to connect for a bit and then gives up. Doesn't even give me a prompt to enter the network password.

MichaelLC

Sounds like you set it up, so I'm guessing you;d know if it had MAC Address filtering?

In Win7, do you need to specify if it's in your Home or Office Network or something? I worked on a friend's and had a little trouble getting it to see the network.

Heir

Nope, no MAC address filtering. Very strange. For now I'm just plugged into it...which isn't a huge deal. Just curious really more than anything else.

MushroomStick

Does one of your neighbors have a network within range that your computer is trying to connect to?

Heir

No. I had tried connecting to a network when i was waiting for ATT to come out, but no luck.

MushroomStick

Were you still wired into the network when you were trying to connect wirelessly? Just trying to get the dumb questions out of the way.

Heir

Nope, not wired in (well, unless I'm posting on here that is )

I've gone through all the normal steps. I went into device manager too and made sure the network adapter wasn't set to only use wireless b or something, seems it's not.

It's just really odd. I can see the network, signal strength is good, but when I try to connect I get nothing.

Could just be a crappy network adapter. I haven't had to use it in a couple years (used wired at my last two places).

rockmonkey

You said it doesn't ask for you to enter a password? Does that mean the SSID for the router is already being "remembered" by windows along with a password, which could be incorrect at this point? While if it was incorrect it should pop up asking you to enter a correct key it may not be for some reason.

Steps I'd take:

poke around and find the list of wifi networks your windows wifi connection has, tell it to forget or remove your current wifi network from the list. search for wifi networks and then reenter the passcode.

Browse to network adapters and right-click the wifi adapter and disable it, then right-click it again and re-enable it.

Make sure whatever wifi adapter you are using is NOT trying to use it's own wifi network managing software. If that is running and you're trying to use windows 7 to manage your wifi connection/networks then they can cause conflicts. This is an annoying piece of software that isn't needed nowadays since people are running AT LEAST Windows XP if not vista or 7 which have wifi handling built in from the beginning. It's more a leftover from Win98 and eariler.

After that I'd browse to your router's IP address to check out it's settings. Hook up with a cable to your desktop or use your laptop. open a browser or windows explorer window and type in the router's IP. It's probably 192.168.1.254 but you can check it by clicking start, type cmd in the search bar right there and then when it finds it open the command prompt. At the prompt type: "ipconfig" without the quotes, look and see what the ip for the "default gateway" is listed as. This is the IP you should be trying to browse to as it's the ip address of the router you are connected to.

Once you browse to it, it will ask for a username and password. the username is admin and unless you changed it (and the router was supplied by att uverse) then the password is on a silver sticker on the side of the router/gateway box itself. It's not the wep or network key but should be listed there, might be called router password (sometimes they appear it [ ]'s, but not on my uverse box at home).

Inside the router settings there is a section/tab for wireless, go there and poke around, if MAC filtering is on, turn it off for now and see if that fixes it, you can always turn it back on if you want. Might even try changing the type of security/encryption to something older/simplier like a simple short WEP or disabling the security entirely for a minute or two and seeing if that allows you to connect, instead of a WPA or such.

The trick is the proccess of elimination.

Heir

@rockmonkey, thanks for that. I'm aware of those steps, and actually went through most of them.

However I missed one, and that was it! It looks like for whatever reason I can't connect when using WPA or WPA 2. If I turn off security or set to WEP it will connect.

That's....odd.