Monday, December 03, 2007

Dell, Vista and DHCP

I recently became the proud owner of a Dell Dimension 9200 with Vista Home Premium. I started it up plugged it in and discovered I couldn't access the internet. Being computer literate I decided to investigate the problem. Starting with the comand prompt.

IPONFIG

This showed me my IP address was in the 169.x.x.x range. I immediatley knew that was an APIPA address and for some reason DHCP wasnt working. The connection said local only. Baffled I plugged an old XP workstation into the same cable and I immediatley had full access to the net.

After some investigating and installing a wireless card to see if that connected any better (It connected fine - still no DHCP though!) I was getting very frustrated. I found this potential solution on the net:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233/en-us

I followed the instructions but still had no luck.

I phoned Microsoft who told me that as I had bought an OEM product it was Dells problem or they could charge me for support. I phoned Dell. Dell told me that as I can ping computers when i set a static IP address that it was a software problem and they could refer me to a local engineer who would charge me to repair it. I am a local engineer - and none of the solutions on the web work.

Has anyone else had this problem - how did you get arround it?

No comments: