Netbook, back again

[Chris Bartram]

Evolution is the closest thing to that, and did a fairly good job last time I tried it

[Chris Bartram]

There's a lot of business apps beyond Office that only ever get developed for Windows- things more specialised.

Shared calendaring is what it does quite well, so in conjuction with Exchange you can invite people and book resources (like a meeting room, or projector, or videoconference equipment) in a few clicks. It handles that very well, to be fair. It's not an excellent mail client, though it's connectivity over https and offline working works very well now.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Libre office is pretty much all there. Doesn't do meetings an calendars . Thunderbird does but not sure about interfacing with others

looks pretty close tho

[Jethro_uk]

So the biggest chunk of Outlook then ... bit like a car that doesn't go places, but has a nice stereo

Take it from me, Thunderbird is *not* the Outlook replacement you are looking for. And development on the extensions which might have made it that way stopped years ago.

[Jack98]

One of the more capable calendars particularly with synched multi person event scheduling. Of course there are now cloud calendars that do that too, just like with email now too. Good api that allows you to add events from access and excel etc.

[John Rumm]

None that I could see - all MAC related filtering and access control options are not configured.

[John Rumm]

I manually set DNS - none of the DHCP parameters were being set. It was timing out and defaulting to a APIPA style 169.254.n.n address, with no default gateway or DNS server addresses.

Indeed, but waiting on a suitable neighbour to return from hols before we can check that.

(Mobile is pre smartphone era)

Interesting, but not useful.

(its a fairly common Atheros AR2427 wifi adaptor)

Yup.

This is one of those cases where its less effort to try and fix it, than to try and explain how to fix it. (especially when there are competing methodologies!)

Looks like just the standard WinXP SP3 one.

[T i m]

<snip>

And Word can Track Changes, again important in many organisations.

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

I did. It was running the latest edition offered by ASUS for that machine, but I also tried a later offering from Qualcomm.

[John Rumm]

Not quite to bed - the OP is still trying a few additional things I have suggested. We are also waiting for access to anther network to try to connect to.

It seems that way. Its very similar to the parameter 43 problem that used to bite XP at one point. Although IIRC that would also cause a DHCP fail on Ethernet as well.

[John Rumm]

ISTR there were (apparently mythical[1]) issues with cloned SIDs on a domain... I don't recall a network related one though.

[1]

(I suppose I could create a VPN from the XP box back here ad join it to a domain controller running in a VM, but I am sceptical that will solve the problem)

The router could see a total of three devices that had DHCPed, a couple of SWMBO's iThings, and the Eee's ethernet.

Yup Win server really does like to be master of all things DHCP and DNS, that's for sure!

[John Rumm]

Talk nicely to Exchange based email systems. Allow configuration and setting of *server* side things like sophisticated mail filtering, and very easy to setup and use "out of office" notifications. Also calendar integration etc.

(there are also things its crap at - like it seems unable to use roaming profiles with IMAP mailboxes).

[John Rumm]

Yup, many things that go https by default also require security levels not provide for in IE6 to 8, as pre-loaded on WinXP boxes.

(you can usually get a more recent version of firefox going though)

[T i m]

Noted. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

p.s. If the OP could put a USB stick in there for you, you could remotely download and install Linux to it ... and if he could boot from it and launch Teamviewer (or you could probably get in other ways), you could see if the WiFi would then function properly. ;-)

I actually *installed* Linux on a laptop for a Freecycler that way. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Understood, but I was more asking if the DNS was actually functioning (even if it had to be / once set manually), eg, you could access sites via their names, not directly with the ip address?

Ok.

Useful in that you know the hardware does work and it could still be a fixable 'soft' problem?

Noted. (As mentioned elsewhere, I might have tried an Intel WiFi adaptor in there, because I can (and not so easy to do remotely)). ;-)

Strange then that it now can't ... like it was a 'soft' issue. I wonder how we could try to test for that. ;-)

Agreed. I did exactly the same today (after doing some decorating tools shopping for daughter and walking the dogs (~5 miles in this heat)). A good but elderly friend phoned yesterday to ask for help on one of the PC's I built for him ages ago. 'The screen had gone black and all the icons gone', whilst he was looking if his (desktop) PC, (right beside the router) had WiFi?? [1]

Long short, somehow he'd put it in tablet mode with it defaulting to that mode at signin ... How do they do it!?

Oh well, we had a good chat (and my Mrs his Mrs) at the same time and got a nice cup of tea. ;-)

Did you try disabling it (OOI)?

Cheers, T i m

[1] Turns out he had bought an Amazon Echo and doesn't have a Smartphone (so I used mine for setting it up after I sorted the desktop issue). ;-)

He had downloaded a Windows App that he seemed to think should do it but ironically, not to his WiFi equipped laptop. ;-)

[Chris Bartram]

Some daft bastard must have installed or enabled it- pretty sure it was never on by default.

[dennis]

I had a problem with a stupid linux device (an android phone) that would insist on using the same IP address as one of my Synology NAS servers even when DHCP was set. It just wouldn't change its address to what the router told it to use and caused intermittent fails on the backups. In the end I gave up and moved the Synology to a new address.

Everything else on the network uses the pre-assigned address from the router but that phone just wouldn't.

[Jethro_uk]

I was under the impression that the Linux Office equivalents for Word and Excel were pretty complete ? If they're missing big stuff like that (with no plans to introduce it) then again, stop wasting my time with "linux on the desktop" stories :)

[Jethro_uk]

The reason was that when they connected to "foreign" networks, they couldn't be sure of DHCP - or indeed any server services. Which is why they put NT *Server* on the laptop in the first place.

[Chris Bartram]

OOI, what were they doing?