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Hey Justin, it’s Beth, Matthew’s girlfriend. My cousin is having some problems with her wireless internet and I was hoping you could help. She says all of her equipment is fine, but she gets an error saying “cannot renew IP address.” She knows where to find the IP address, but is still having problems. What would you suggest? Thanks for any help.

Hi Beth, thanks for stopping by. Hmm. I’m assuming she’s running Windows? Usually when Windows says it can’t renew the IP address, there’s something wrong with the connection between the laptop and the wireless access point.

Things I would try:

1) turn off the wireless access point for 15 seconds and turn it back on
2) reboot the laptop
3) turn off WEP/WPA encryption on the wireless access point, make sure laptop’s internet connection is not configured to expect encryption
4) change the SSID of the wireless access point, and see if her laptop sees the new SSID?

In order to manually renew a new IP address (the geeky way) after each of the steps above, she can goto Start > Run, type cmd, press Enter, type ipconfig /renew and press Enter.

If she just types ipconfig at the command line, it should show all the details about her internet connection(s). There should be a line that starts with “IP address.” If it’s followed by a series of numbers that usually look something like 192.168.1.x where x is a number beteween 0 and 255 things are good. If it says something like 169.x.x.x then that’s Windows basically saying it still can’t find an IP address.

If the problem is that the wireless access point can’t get an IP address from her cable/DSL internet provider, I’d suggest calling their tech support.

Hi Justin,
It’s Kelly, Beth’s cousin. I’ll start from the beginning. My wireless connection was working just fine, and then one day it wasn’t. I think it was after reloading my McAfee Virus Scan, but it may not have been immediately after. Now I have great signal strength, but no connectivity. When I try to repair, I get the “cannot renew IP address” I tried cmd trick, but it tells me “no operation can be performed on Local Area COnnection while it has its media disconnected. An error occured while renewing interface Wireless Network COnnection 6.” No clue what that means. I can see the IP address displayed under details- network connections. PLease don’t make me call TIme Warner - I hate them!

Kelly, hmm. I share your disdain for internet service provider support. But that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.

If you think the “McAfee Virus Scan” might be the culprit, I’d try turning it off, making sure it hasn’t enable a firewall so strong that you can’t access your own wireless access point.

At this point any number of things could be going wrong, and I’m not using Windows at the moment, so it’s hard to give good suggestions without seeing what you’re looking at.

Some questions: is your wireless card built into your computer? If not could you reinstall your wireless card drivers?

If you go to Start > Control Panel > Network Connections, there should be only two or three entries listed, one for your wired ethernet port, and one for your wireless port (there may also be some misc lines). Your mention of “Wireless Network Connection 6″ suggests things might be incorrectly configured, and you might want to delete the extraneous connections so you just have a single wireless option. Then you’ll have to make sure it’s configured according to the instructions that came with your wireless access point.

If you’d rather avoid Time Warner, I’d suggest at least calling the manufacturer of your wireless access point (Linksys, D-Link, etc). They usually have decent support, and can probably help you more specifically with your particular brand and model.

I just had the same problem with McAfee. On its own it started blocking the IP address for my wireless router. I had to go into McAfee’s security center settings and tell it to allow the routers private IP address. The address should start with “192″.

I hope you already solved the problem.