Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Help! My browser won’t connect to the internet!


There are a lot of things which can cause this, but I would just like to touch on two of them. First of all if you see something on the bottom (or top) of your screen which looks similar to this –> disconnected wireless it may indicate that your wireless isn’t working on your computer. If you click on the icon you may see one or more connections. If one of them is called WHITLX click on it to see if your wireless card will connect to it. If you don’t see WHITLIX you may be having a hardware issue or the wireless card may be physically turned off, in which case you may see a switch on the front or left side of your laptop which when toggled to the on position will show you a little green square. Then try your internet connections again to see if WHITLIX shows up in about 60 seconds. If you have on of the small netbook computers this wireless switch is a small green push button on the top of your keyboard.
Secondly, if your wireless connection looks good connected wireless you may be having a problem with your internet settings. This is only applicable to those of you who are using a Windows computer (which seem to be popping up more and more frequently). On your Windows 7 computer click on the Start button (something like this –> start )  and go to Control Panel. We are looking for a control panel called ioptions which may be in the Net and Internet category. Once you are in Internet Options you will click on Connections at the top, followed by LAN settings. Once there, you will see a checkbox at the top which is labeled Automatically Detect Settings. If there is a check in this box, many applications will be negatively affected by it. You should remove the check from this box if you are planning on using the internet. Click OK and then click OK again.
There may be other things which cause internet problems (like all the servers being down) but these are just a couple things you can check and fix easily enough.