I was called out to help a friend today who was experiencing problems with a brand new Dell Inspiron 1501. Within the two days that she’d had the laptop, and barely used, the Windows XP installation had gotten totally messed up. The desktop had switched to classic view, clicked icons would not run and certain control panel items had no contents. Anyway, instead of chasing the cause of the problem I re-installed Windows from the supplied Dell CD.
Everything was fine and back up and running until I tried to connect to the wireless network that had been installed 2 years back. Sensing that the Dell Network Assistant might be causing problems I uninstalled it and switch to Wireless Zero Configuration. Again, I couldn’t connect to the network which was showing fine in the list of available wireless networks and flagged as having WPA security. After a few tries I asked a couple of questions and was told that the network was configured with WEP security on a shared key. Changing this over immediately gave a connection and we were up and running again.
Quite why Windows XP was reporting that the network was WPA and not WEP I’m not sure but if anybody has any ideas I’d sure be glad to hear them.
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