Skip to navigation

PCPro-Computing in the Real World Printed from www.pcpro.co.uk

Register to receive our regular email newsletter at http://www.pcpro.co.uk/registration.

The newsletter contains links to our latest PC news, product reviews, features and how-to guides, plus special offers and competitions.

// Home / Blogs

Posted on May 19th, 2008 by Tim Danton

Having fun with Windows’ networks-diagnosis tool

Shock and horror, a not-terribly-useful error messageIt could be that I’m incredibly unlucky, or it could be that the built-in Windows network repair tool is entirely hopeless. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve used it, but can remember with absolute certainty how many times it’s worked: none.

The most recent time I optimistically pressed the ‘Diagnose and repair’ link was this weekend, when it came up with the entirely unhelpful message that the reason for my faulty wireless network was because a cable wasn’t connected into my Ethernet port. A big thank you to the Microsoft error dialog writers for that one.

In the end, I had no alternative: I had to resort to the time-honoured reboot. Even that didn’t work. Nor did rebooting the router. In fact, it was only when I called my dad and talked the problem through that he pointed out the error must be a software setting somewhere. This, I should shamefacedly admit, was after I’d swapped out the router and all the connecting cables.

It took me a princely 24 hours to solve the problem, and with a better diagnosis tool I reckon that would have been 24 seconds. Surely it’s not beyond the ken of Microsoft to build a tool that works out the two bits of a network that aren’t connecting as they should?

So am I just unlucky? Are other people out there having success with it?

Tags: , , ,

Posted in: Rant, Software

Permalink | Trackback

Follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Social Bookmark this article: What is this?

3 Responses to “ Having fun with Windows’ networks-diagnosis tool ”

  1. Greg Auger Says:
    May 19th, 2008 at 2:16 pm

    Yep, I haven’t tried Vista, but the the XP tools never work for me first time.

     
  2. Nicholas Says:
    May 20th, 2008 at 12:31 pm

    None of the windows utilities work for me in any case. Been fairly lucky though, wired always seems to work for me!

     
  3. David Says:
    May 29th, 2008 at 5:25 pm

    I’ve found it to be useless whenever I had a problem. A couple of days ago one of my laptops refused to connect to the internet. It would connect to the router but then be unable to connect to the internet. The diagnostics were entirely unhelpful. My other laptop (both are Sony, both connecting via Wi-Fi, both running Vista) had no problems. Rebooting the miscreant computer had no effect, but strangely rebooting the router did.

     

Leave a Reply

* required fields

* Will not be published

Categories

Authors

Archives

advertisement

SEARCH
SIGN UP

Your email:

Your password:

remember me

advertisement


Hitwise Top 10 Website 2008