Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 won’t connect to WPA wireless
I say Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 in the title but this also includes other ‘older’ laptops that have the ‘boxy’ grey look to them and the mouse touchpad that isn’t actually a touchpad.
Usually when connecting to a wireless network that has the WPA encryption (whether it be TKIP or AES it doesn’t matter) a message dialog will come up saying check that the password etc is correct and then you simply have to click the ‘OK’ button and your no better off.
The actually problem is that the older type of laptops only support the WEP encryption due to the wireless cards inside of the laptops being 802.11b, however, WPA requires a card with the 802.11g standard.
In simple terms it means you need to use the WEP encryption when configuring your wireless network but then this means that people such as the likes of me could easily tap into your network and start messing around with your files, maybe even take a look at your bank details while your doing online banking if works a little quiet. So, we don’t want our wireless networks using the WEP encryption do we, we may as well just give local hackers a few hundred quid each month.
For once the solution to this is very simple, you need to go out and buy yourself a wireless dongle. If your not too familiar with different types of wireless dongles and what they do (in other words if your not a geek) then don’t worry as every wireless dongle I’ve come across in the shops support WPA encryptions.
Once you’ve installed your wireless dongle you will also need to remember to disable the laptops built in wireless hardware so it doesn’t override the dongle which means a quick visit to the Device Manager. Again, if your not a geek then you can read this article on how to access the device manager and once your there simply expand the ‘Network Adapters’ list, right click on the appropriate wireless (in this case it has the word Toshiba in the item) and click disable. It’ll ask if your sure about it, say yes then off you go. Once you open the wireless window again it should ask for the password this time.
Tip:
What I would also suggest as the sort of laptops that produce this problem don’t have much memory or CPU power is disable or simply don’t install the wireless utility that comes on the disk, this should save you quite a big portion of your memory in relation to the amount you have.
In most installations this will simply require you to untick a box at some point in the installation or tick a box if it says ‘Use windows zero configuration’ (or something along those lines).
If it isn’t as simple as that and a seperate installation pops up after the initial installation of the actual drivers then you can open Task Manager and end the process. I was installing a Netgear WPN111 wireless dongle that came with my router and the process was named ‘wpn111_2_0_setup[1].exe’, I’m sure yours will be roughly the same having setup.exe somewhere in the name.
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