Wireless Laptop Problem

I sometimes use my new laptop to browse the web. It works just fine on my dialup connection at home. But last week I connected via a wireless connection at a coffee house and things went crazy. It's a free connection that the coffee house provides. Some websites would open, others would not. I could get to the Yahoo! home page but the link to email did not work. Other working web sites had non working links. ??????? I played with browser settings in Netscape and IE to no avail. I'm certainly no expert but I know my way around Netscape and IE. I'm runnning Windows XP. Any ideas????

And BTW I used the same laptop at a T Mobile Hotspot (for $6.00/hr!!!) once, and it worked great.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

maybe the coffee houses set up was haveing problems?

1) The coffeehouse's AP might've been set up to filter certain protocols/activities such as SMTP (email). They might also have certain website URLs filtered out.

2) Your browser's privacy settings might be set a little bit too tightly. Go to Tools--->Internet Options--->Privacy and check the settings.

3) You might be stuck within a "Walled Garden" in their A/P, pending authentication.

4) Their AP and/or router might simply be acting erratically.

Hope this helps...

Yeah I don't think it was your laptop. Just like mine works fine at home, wired or wireless, but I step into the school and BAM! I'm subject to their wonderful /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif Novell boarder manager.

There's a few other possibilities that I thought of -

1) The A/P might not have enough bandwidth on the ethernet backbone to support the number of users.

2) There could be some DOS attacks going on.

3) There could be local interference from another AP, a 2.4ghz cordless phone, or even a microwave oven, all of which can use the same frequencies.

It might be helpful to sniff the traffic to look for DOS or virus/trojan activity. If you do so, make sure it's done in promiscuous mode with name resolution turned off so it doesn't wind up adding to the problem.

A problem I've had sometimes is that the access points don't provide valid DNS server addresses. In which case the computer is supposed to route the traffic to the gateway which will handle it. But Windows doesn't always do that. It could be that sites that were already in your DNS cache loaded fine, but that other sites you had to look up wouldn't display. I've seen exactly this before.

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James S said:
A problem I've had sometimes is that the access points don't provide valid DNS server addresses. In which case the computer is supposed to route the traffic to the gateway which will handle it. But Windows doesn't always do that. It could be that sites that were already in your DNS cache loaded fine, but that other sites you had to look up wouldn't display. I've seen exactly this before.

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That's a really good possibility!

Yeah, windows has this weird problem with DNS servers. If it can't find the NAME to go with the address for the primary DNS server, it freaks out and goes to the secondary server. If it can't resolve a name for that one, it just errors out. There's no legitimate reason it should need this, but it does. Therefore, if the DNS server you're using doesn't have an entry for itself, you can't use it with windows.

FWIW, the nslookup utility will work if you specify the server on the commandline by its numerical address, even if it doesn't have a name.

All of this is assuming WinXP pro, BTW.

Thanks for the replies guys. I knew this was the place to ask.