I work at Marquette university as a TSS in the College of Arts and Sciences.
I had a few student bring in their dell laptops during New Student
Orientation because they were having a problem connecting to the network on
campus. I quickly realized what the problem was (or so I thought) and
disabled the N mode of the wireless card (switching it to b/g rather than
a/b/g). However, this didn't work, and ultimately those students had to call
Dell and be informed that their computers would not connect to our wireless
network. I noticed while I was looking at the driver settings that these
cards are on both IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time. I was wondering, does
this make a difference? They were the same model notebooks running vista
home premium. I ran out of ideas and turned them to Dell but im still
looking for answers.

Yes, that could be the issue. This troubleshooting may help,

Vista compatible issuesSome switches or routers may not compatible with Vista - Solutions: upgrade the firmware, disable the IPv6, re-configure the speed, and setup TCP/IP ...
www.chicagotech.net/vista/vistacompatible.htm


Bob Lin, MS-MVP, MCSE & CNE
Networking, Internet, Routing, VPN Troubleshooting on http://www.ChicagoTech.net
How to Setup Windows, Network, VPN & Remote Access on http://www.HowToNetworking.com
"Don Kallman" wrote in message ...
I work at Marquette university as a TSS in the College of Arts and Sciences.
I had a few student bring in their dell laptops during New Student
Orientation because they were having a problem connecting to the network on
campus. I quickly realized what the problem was (or so I thought) and
disabled the N mode of the wireless card (switching it to b/g rather than
a/b/g). However, this didn't work, and ultimately those students had to call
Dell and be informed that their computers would not connect to our wireless
network. I noticed while I was looking at the driver settings that these
cards are on both IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time. I was wondering, does
this make a difference? They were the same model notebooks running vista
home premium. I ran out of ideas and turned them to Dell but im still
looking for answers.

"Don Kallman" wrote in message
...
I work at Marquette university as a TSS in the College of Arts and
Sciences.
I had a few student bring in their dell laptops during New Student
Orientation because they were having a problem connecting to the network
on
campus. I quickly realized what the problem was (or so I thought) and
disabled the N mode of the wireless card (switching it to b/g rather than
a/b/g). However, this didn't work, and ultimately those students had to
call
Dell and be informed that their computers would not connect to our
wireless
network. I noticed while I was looking at the driver settings that these
cards are on both IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time. I was wondering, does
this make a difference? They were the same model notebooks running vista
home premium. I ran out of ideas and turned them to Dell but im still
looking for answers.



Connecting to the wireless network is a lower level function than TCP/IP.

What protocols you choose to run over your network ( IPv4, IPv6, IPX,
NetBEUI, whatever ) is unrelated to the physical connection.

You need to determine what encryption / authentication your wireless network
infrastructure is using. The wireless network drivers on the laptop need
to support those options. Then, you can choose to use either windows or
the card manufacturer's utilities to configure the settings. The
manufacturer's utilities often have more options than windows, for example
Cisco networks often use cisco's LEAP authentication, and that is not
bundled with windows, but it is usually supported by the manufacturer's
utilities. Unless your wireless network has some seriously wierd
requirements, then I ***strongly*** doubt that a dell laptop with built-in
wireless would be unable to connect. I'm 99.9999999 % sure that laptop can
connect to Unsecured, WEP, cisco LEAP, WPA, 802.1x, WPA2 using EAP-TLS or
PEAP, and AES encryption. If your wireless lan requires something else,
than I think it's probably officially classed as 'wierd', in which case you
are the victim of your own ( institution's) perverseness. ( I say this
because I have come across institutions which have made committee decisions
on how the WLAN will work, with no regard to if those options are actually
supported by any manufacturers. )

I'd be interested in knowing exactly why dell said they couldn't connect.
It's 1 of 3:
1) Your wireless infrastructure is 'wierd'. The drivers and config utils
don't support it.
2) The drivers / utils are lame, and are failing to support a standard
wireless infrastructure.
3) The support staff are lame, and just can't configure it right.

If you post the details of the config settings required by your wireless
LAN; and the exact details of the wireles hardware or model details of the
dell, then we can probably advise.

Once you get connected, you can disable IPv6 or leave it enabled,depending
on your requirements. I run both IPv4 and IPv6 over wirelesss on a dell
610 laptop here, using Intel built-in wireless. I'm using WPA2-enterprise,
with radius servers and a certificate infrastructure.

--
Ron