I've had at least five customers in approximately the last seven days, and I guess I have visited four or five of them, with a very odd networking issue.
The computer complains that it has not picked up a valid IP address from the router. It tends to also say "unidentified network", and allocates itself an IP address which obviously won't work on that network.
When I first encountered this problem, I gave the customer the usual no-brainer things to try themselves like power-cycling the router, rebooting the computer, troubleshooting the network adapter, etc. None of that helped, so I visited the customer.
The customer didn't have any third party security software installed, so there goes that possibility. I tried the most basic thing I'd normally try first, and configured a static IP for that PC that I knew would theoretically allow it to communicate with the router. I then pinged the router and was surprised when it worked. I then set the IP configuration back to automatic and it worked fine.
I've had several customers like this in such a short period of time. Normally I might expect one customer a month with a problem vaguely like this, but I certainly wouldn't expect the above solution to work with it.
I've checked two of the PCs to see whether they had recent Windows updates, but both last had an update on the 11th of November or thereabouts. I think it was a cumulative update for 1607.
I had theorised that all the customers had a router in common, but that's not the case. I then theorised that all affected PCs had been upgraded to Win10, but my most recent customer with this issue recently had a clean install by me on their brand-new computer.
I have no idea what's causing this. I had hoped to come up with a simpler way to fix this problem that I could instruct any customer to do themselves, but no such luck yet.
I haven't seen this problem on an older version of Windows yet.
The computer complains that it has not picked up a valid IP address from the router. It tends to also say "unidentified network", and allocates itself an IP address which obviously won't work on that network.
When I first encountered this problem, I gave the customer the usual no-brainer things to try themselves like power-cycling the router, rebooting the computer, troubleshooting the network adapter, etc. None of that helped, so I visited the customer.
The customer didn't have any third party security software installed, so there goes that possibility. I tried the most basic thing I'd normally try first, and configured a static IP for that PC that I knew would theoretically allow it to communicate with the router. I then pinged the router and was surprised when it worked. I then set the IP configuration back to automatic and it worked fine.
I've had several customers like this in such a short period of time. Normally I might expect one customer a month with a problem vaguely like this, but I certainly wouldn't expect the above solution to work with it.
I've checked two of the PCs to see whether they had recent Windows updates, but both last had an update on the 11th of November or thereabouts. I think it was a cumulative update for 1607.
I had theorised that all the customers had a router in common, but that's not the case. I then theorised that all affected PCs had been upgraded to Win10, but my most recent customer with this issue recently had a clean install by me on their brand-new computer.
I have no idea what's causing this. I had hoped to come up with a simpler way to fix this problem that I could instruct any customer to do themselves, but no such luck yet.
I haven't seen this problem on an older version of Windows yet.