Vista "Local only" connection problem

I am using Sony VAIO laptop running with Windows Vista since past 8 months. The laptop has Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG network adapter and this system was working fine with my Netgear DG834G router. There was no problem with betwork connecting until last night, today morning when I started the laptop I found the little network icon in the system tray saying “Unidentified Network” and “Local Only.”

I dint made any changes overnight then how come it suddenly stopped my network access. I don’t have any idea. Can anyone here please help me out fixing this? Thank you very much.

Did you left your laptop Turned ON yesterday night before leaving? If yes, there are possibilities system would have installed some Windows update which might have caused this problem. Also which antivrus are you using? Is it set for auto update?

Thank you very much for the reply friend. Nope, my laptop was shutdown yesterday night. But there is one thing I forgot to mention in my above post. Today morning when I started the laptop, it connected to internet fine, and asked me to restart the computer to install Norton Updates. When I restarted, the problem started since then. Since then I’m not able to connect wirelessly or via cable. Also my wireless adapter shows only 169 address. There is no DNS or Gateway IP.

So is it Norton or its update created this problem?

First of all if you have Norton installed on your computer, definitely you are going to get many such problems on your Vista. Norton or any Symantec product is well known for creating problems in network stuff, especially on Vista. So you should uninstall it completely from the system, reboot and see if the problem still exists.

Other than this, as you said the Wireless Adapter is showing address ‘169’, it indicates that system is not able to receive the IP from DHCP. In order to fix it, you should completely disable IPv6 or try to assign static IP on your router.

Yeah Amosz, you sound correct. He need to disable the IPv6 but this is how. First go to Device Manager and uninstall the wireless NIC. Restart the laptop and let windows install it again itself. Once done, now disable the IPv6 and see if the problem is resolved.

Just follow these steps:

1. Go to network and sharing center (right click on your connection icon, lower right on screen, click network and sharing).
2. Click on Manage Network Connection to the right of this window 3.Now right click on the adapter you are trying to use and select properties.
3. Click on ipv4 Internet and click properties
4. Ok, so now you need your routers IP, you can get to this if you have access to the router. I have a netgear router and set the following:
5. IP Address 192.168.1.3 (The reason the end is 3 is so it doesn't conflict with my other computer)
   
   • Subnet Mask 255.255.255.0
   • Default Gateway 192.168.1.1
   • Preferred DNS: 192.168.1.1