Weird problem - UK laptop use in US

I have an ASUS laptop I bought in the UK and I am now living in the US. I'm having a strange problem that has flummoxed our internet provider tech.

We have our broadband, cable, and phone provided by Verizon here in Maryland. When I have my laptop on, I can see our wireless network AND connect to it. BUT I cannot get any web pages to load. When we were at my Mom's old house, I could see the wireless network she had there (as well as others from neighbors) but again, I was unable to actually get a web page to load.

Our Verizon tech spend a good half hour going through the settings and he could not find anything wrong but admitted it is probably something simple. We agreed the whole point of laptops is to be able to take them anywhere in the world but he said he had heard of people with foreign-bought laptops who have the same problem I'm having.

To further complicate things, I CAN get web pages to load if I am hard wired!

Any ideas? I really need this laptop to be wireless as it's going to our office upstairs away from the router.

And no, I never had any problems getting online in the UK.

TIA!!

ETA, the laptop is not even a year old - running Vista.

The same thing happened to me when I first tried to go wireless with Sky.  I can't remember exactly what the tech had me to, but it was something to do with the internet settings.

It was a quick fix, but obviously you need to know a lot about computers (which I don't).

Good luck!

I had this problem with my UK laptop when I got to the US in January - the internet wouldn't work at all, even though I could connect to the wireless.

Quick question: when you manage to connect to the wireless networks, what does it say when you put the mouse over your internet icon in the bottom corner of the screen? If it says 'Currently connected to: Network X. Access: Local only', that means that you actually are not connected to the internet but are just picking up the signal from the router - this is usually the main reason that you cannot load pages. It needs to say 'Access: Local and Internet' in order to load the pages.

For my computer, it turned out that I still had the static IP address from my Bristol Uni department network set up and so it was blocking the wireless signal (the wireless needs to be able to find an IP address automatically each time you connect, but if it is set to a static, permanent one, it won't work).

See if this works (the Verizon tech may have tried this already, but this is what worked for me):

 - From the Start menu, go into Control Panel (I'm doing this from the Vista layout)
 - Click on Network and Internet
 - then click on Network and Sharing Center and then Manage Network Connections (listed in right panel)
- this should come up with a window showing all your internet connections.
- Right-click on the wireless connection icon and go into Properties
- highlight Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6) and click on Properties
- check that it is set to 'Obtain IP address automatically' and 'Obtain DNS server automatically' and make sure that all other fields are blank. Close Properties window.
- now highlight Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and do the same for this one - making sure that the 'Obtain IP address/DNS server automatically' boxes are ticked and the 'Use the following IP address/DNS server' boxes are blank.
- If you previously had an IP address/DNS server set up manually, then changing it to obtaining it automatically should hopefully stop your internet problem.
- If not, you may need to try something else.

Hope this helps

Thanks K! I haven't had a chance to try this yet but will do so asap!

Fiddlesticks, got halfway through writing a reply to this saying "I bet you have a static IP address" before I noticed that that was exactly what someone else had just said. So I guess all I can add now is that I'll bet you this is the right answer (although it surprises me that your internet tech guys didn't get this, so maybe it isn't!).

UPDATE!!! It worked!! Thanks so much K! There was only one box in the Version 4 that wasn't as it should be and that did it.

I am SO happy. Now I can stop using my mother's laptop! I have my own bookmarks again! Yay!!

Cheers!

Yay - glad you got it sorted out .