Connectivity issues with Wired and Wireless

mittewi

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Nov 30, 2009
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So a lady I work with is having a very strange connectivity issue.
The beast is a HP DV9000 still running Vista (don't go there)

Wireless takes a long time to connect (it actually pops up a box saying "This is taking longer than normal to connect") then connects "with limited connectivity" It will show a connection, but no packets will move, nothing will come up in a web browser.

A similar thing happens with a wired connection, plug in the ethernet and the lights on the port come on, the NIC properties show connected, but no data moves.

These issues led me to think it must be a firewall issue. The PC has Windows defender (disabled, but installed) and AVG in use. I'd shut down and disable the AVG too, but it still wouldn't work.

To make sure it wasn't a still-running background process firewall running I even booted into Safe Mode with Networking, tried both wired and wireless and still nothing.

Hardware Manager shows no driver issues for either wired or wireless.

The entire process has been repeated on three different wireless networks and two wired networks to no avail.

SO - the nitty gritty questions - is this a Southbridge failure?
If it was Southbrige, would a USB wireless adapter work?
Should I swap HDD and run a Linux distro to rule out a Windows issue?

I don't have the laptop with me now, but will get it back to test any theories you can give me.
 
Have you/her checked for viruses to make sure something isn't trying to jack the connection? AVG is kinda bleh... Avast typically works great though. You should consider a virus scan, and possibly install Malwarebytes. It will usually pick up what AVG and/or Avast doesn't catch.
 


I thought about that but didn't have a live disk or USB to run them from. If a virus was the culprit, could it mask it's data transmission from the Task Manager and NIC status screen? Not even the indicator lights on the ethernet jack are showing activity.
 
You should definitely do a virus scan, and get Malwarebytes on the computer. I'm not 100% sure if it can mask itself or not (most likely it can). I work for a large building in the IT dept. and 99.9% of the time a computer wont connect to the internet (1500+ computers) is because of a virus/malware trying to jack the internet. But, I'm not saying that rules out the network adapter as being a culprit either. Just giving you one thing to check for process elimination lol.