Obscenely long time to connect to a network

[aestheticend]

I have an asus G72Gx laptop running windows 7 home premium. Went through the nightmare of my wireless antenna never turning back on and now I am facing a new issue.

My laptop is taking a really long time to connect to a network. And I mean a REALLY long time. Minutes. When it should be near instant.

The problem happens on both the wireless and the wired NIC. I have also tried this at multiple locations: home, airports, hotels all with the same result. Not only does it take a while for it to establish a connection to the router, but it seems to take the same amount of "extra time" for it to get internet connectivity. It will initially connect to a network and windows will give the "Limited Access" message. And then a couple minutes later I will have internet access.

This is absolutely driving me nuts. Also it seems to have the added side effect of making it difficult to connect to lobbies in the Starcraft 2 beta. It might be unrelated, but I digress.

Any Thoughts?

 

[The_Prophecy]

Are you just watching the little network status icon? Or are you actually checking connectivity?

 

[aestheticend]

Thanks for the reply,

Both, i guess.

The little icon seems to be almost right on when it comes to internet access. When it's stuck on "identifying" I won't have an IP address via ipconfig or the status window under the properties. When it shows "Limited Access"I will have an IP but no internet access. I guess could you elaborate on what you mean or give me an example.

 

[The_Prophecy]

Are you just watching the icon, or are you actually opening a web browser to try going to any web page or a command line window to try pinging something?

 

[aestheticend]

Yeah, I am doing both.

When it is taking forever to connect if I try to ping I will get a general failure.

And my previous post was incorrect that, when it is still trying to establish a connection, the adapter doesn't even show up in the ipconfig. Maybe it is just taking windows along time to initialize the hardware?

Also opening a web browser will obviously show nothing when I don't have connectivity.

 

[The_Prophecy]

First, flash your BIOS to the latest version (602) and flash it, then download the latest network driver for your laptop.

 

[aestheticend]

No, go.

Flashed the BIOS and installed new drivers. Same issue..

 

[The_Prophecy]

If you have a spare hard drive handy, pop it into your laptop and use the setup disk you got from Asus to deploy a fresh image to the drive. See if the issue still occurs. If it does, I wonder if perhaps you may have a faulty unit?

 

[aestheticend]

Yeah, I was thinking about that for a next step.. Need to get a hold of another drive so i don't have to re-install everything.

 

[tomwilmeth]

my son recently downloaded the Starcraft 2 beta and since then I have had network issues when he is playing the game my belkin wireless card takes forever to load and freezes my laptop. I have better luck with the internal wireless connection but it still takes forever to load anything when he is running the game

 

[aestheticend]

I used the recovery partition to reinstall the OS to it's factory state. This seems to have sorted the issue out. And then after all of this hassle i found the culprit.

It was forticlient. I have this VPN installed for work purposes and somehow it was messing with windows 7. Once I re-installed it I started having issues connecting to networks ( taking forever ) as well as connecting to the SC2 beta. I know forticlient comes with an endpoint protection piece, but I unistalled that and was still having issues. It was definitely the VPN client.

Does the virtual tunnel adapters that the client installs confuse windows? Maybe it trys to connect them and fails when initializing a connection? I'm not that familiar with virtual adapters and such. In XP there was some sort of prioritization you could mess with in the network stack to get things to work. Is there something similar in windows 7?.

This is a huge annoyance as I have to have vpn access for work, but this really causes some huge problems. Namely the time it takes to make a connection and obviously not being able to play the SC2 beta when I am on the road is a huge loss.


I do have a virtual PC installed, well it will be once it get it back up and running, that is running windows xp for some older apps that I use for work. Does anyone know if you can use a vVPN client on a virtual pc? That would be a good workaround for me. I could use that virtual PC for all my work apps and keep the VPN in there.

 

[aestheticend]

Best answer selected by aestheticend.

 

[seani1984]

I had the same issue after installing forticlient on windows 7, it would take 4-5 minutes to connect to my wireless network and would keep saying 'limited access'.

I found the solution here:

http://support.fortinet.com/forum/tm.asp?m=57783&p=2&tmode=1&smode=1

What worked for me and seems to have worked for others is to unistall and reinstall the driver for my wireless network adapter. After a restart I can now connect to my wirless network in seconds and the VPN still works correctly.

 

[windows7guy]

Hello aestheticend,

Have you looked into the DNS? Flush out the cache and see what happens.
Microsoft does have an official Windows 7 Support Forum located here http://tinyurl.com/9fhdl5 . It is supported by product specialists as well as engineers and support teams. You may want to check the threads available there for additional assitance and support.

John M
Microsoft Windows Client Team

 

[jojo_mcbean]

I had the exact same problem: it took 30 seconds to connect to the wireless. The solution: DISABLE IPv6 !!! It's that simple... then reboot and now I have instant connections...

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

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