I installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on my Compaq NC6000 which has an Intel PRO 2200BG wireless card. Could not connect at all to my home network (WPA-PSK encrypted network running off a Netgear Access Point). The laptop could not even see any networks even after I enabled the SSID to be broadcast from the router.

The following fix got it to work:

sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant      (Feisty Fawn already has this installed though)

sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome network-manager

sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces  (Comment out everything other than “lo” entries in that file and save the file)

Create a file called /etc/default/wpasupplicant, add entry ENABLED=0 and save the file

sudo touch /etc/default/wpasupplicant

Reboot your system or use the following command

sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart

Left-clicking the network manager on the top of the screen then showed all networks in the vicinity. I was then able to select my network, configure and enter the password. Once this was done I could re-hide the SSID on my router.

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MSN Messenger was not working unable to connect once I had installed it on a PC running Vista. It was just displaying the error code 81000306.

This is due to Vista’s tcpip auto-tuning feature which can be controlled with the netsh command (you will have to open the command window with Admin privileges though):

To Disable Autotuning:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

If you think you need it turned back on:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

Or merely want to check what it is currently set to:
netsh interface tcp show global

I didn’t have to restart my machine after disabling autotuning. MSN Messenger just kicked in almost right away.

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