I recently moved into a dorm at a school whose Internet service is... less than ideal. When I first moved in I planned on using their wired connection. I plugged in my cat6 cable and had to download a program through my school site called SISCO Clean Access. It's a program to make sure your system is up to date and you have anti-virus programs, etc. That worked for a little while until I was forced to update SISCO, which is caused it to no longer work. After spending several frustrating days with the schools Internet Tech Service, the answer I eventually got was that SISCO was not compatible with Vista and I would have to downgrade to XP. I wasn't willing to do this, but my brother and I came up with an idea. I installed a wireless PCI card in my PC and started using the wireless access. This was also working fine, for a little while, until they put a new wireless authentication page in. You have to log into the network and you can only log in for two hours at a time. That would be frustating enough, but apparently the log in also blocks programs like AIM, Everquest II, World of WarCraft, Steam, etc. (but NOT torrent/P2P programs I might add - Which I'm sure is what they're trying to block in the first place).

Now I'm finally getting to the problem I came here to get help with. So the next hoop I was gonna jump through for this circus from hell is to re-attempt to connect via network cable. But ever since I installed my wireless card, my computer no longer recognizes that the cat6 cable is plugged in. The cables fine, and it works on my room mates computer. I'm at a complete loss at where to start to try to fix it. And the tech service guys here are no help.

I'm happy to provide anymore specific information needed.
-Roxwuff

Hey there and welcome to PCHF,

This may sound stupid, but have you gone to Control Panel > Network Connections and disabled the wireless connection and re-enabled the local area connection(s)?

Also, have you tried running the SISCO in compatibility mode with Windows XP? It's an option in the properties menu when you right click a file.

To the first question: Yes and No. In Control Panel > Network Connections it says that my Local Area Connection is still enabled. If I run a diagnostic it gives me a message,

"A cable is not plugged into the network adapter Local Area Connection. Plug a cable into the network adapter Local Area Connection. Click here when you are done so that Windows can check if the problem is resolved."

Problem is, the cable is already plugged in.


To the second question: Yes. I think that's how I got it to work before it forced an update. I believe after the update that no longer worked.