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My dad got a cast-off laptop from work I've been trying to get connected to our wireless network. The laptop is running Vista, and I've updated it to SP2 and all available patches via Windows Update. It uses an Intel 4965AGN wifi card.

The router is a Linksys WRT54GL running the latest version of the Tomato firmware. The wifi is set to broadcast SSID, WPA2 Personal w/ AES encryption. I've had no problem connecting to it with several Macs, iPhones and an iPad (the only other Windows machines I've got around are older ones without wifi).

I can't get the laptop to connect unless the network is unsecured or using WEP. Any combination of WPA or WPA2 with either TKIP or AES encryption and it can't connect (doesn't give any error message beyond "Couldn't connect to network"). It can identify the network just fine, including the type of security being used (verified by netsh wlan show all on the command line). Updating Vista to SP2 with the latest patches hasn't changed anything, nor has grabbing the latest drivers from Intel's site. Hotfix 935222 from Microsoft sounded promising, but it wouldn't install on SP2, looks like it probably was included already.

Using WEP or an unsecured network isn't an acceptable option for me. What can I do to solve this?

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I was able to solve this by disabling the "Afterburner" setting on my router that some Broadcom chips use. On Tomato firmware it's the top setting on the Advanced > Wireless page.

Turns out it causes problems with some Intel wireless chips, but only under WPA/WPA2 encryption.

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  • That's a bummer, I have the same problem connecting to my ISP's wifi spot, from my Windows laptop, but I can't change their settings. Nov 9, 2014 at 9:54

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