Yellow triangle with an exclamation mark

[#1]

A friend of a friend has asked me to look at his laptop, as he cant connect to the internet, and the network icon has a yellow exclamation mark next to it. Hes a bit of a technophobe and the troubleshooting ideas I have sent him he cant manage except to do a virus scan on the outside chance it is...... I am going to have a look, and generally just delete all of the networks stored and reset them, reboot the router and the laptop from scratch. If that dont work, try resetting the winsock stack, and flushing the DNS cache. If all else fails will try setting static DNS servers.  It worked the day before, but the day after this happened. After talking to him, one thing that has confused me is that he still has access to network resources on his local LAN such as networked printers etc.   Anyone any other ideas as to the cause.  I was thinking along the lines of the laptop getting a dodgy IP, but being able to access the LAN, I would have thought would disprove that.....

Laptop is running Win10, which was an upgrade from 7 in the early days of the 10 rollout.

[#2]

Hello there,

If your friend is using a Technicolor/Thomson router we supplied, we are aware of a compatibility issue with the DNS server it assigns the device automatically caused by a recent Windows 10 update that was pushed through not long ago.

I would recommend setting the DNS server in his laptop as 8.8.8.8 for the preferred, and 8.8.4.4 for the alternate.

I hope this helps

[#3]

Thanks. They have only recently joined on ADSL so I suspect that they have the hub zero. Will check anyway.

[#4]

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@Anoush wrote:

I would recommend setting the DNS server in his laptop as 8.8.8.8 for the preferred, and 8.8.4.4 for the alternate.

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So avoiding the use of the Plusnet DNS servers.  Why is that?

[#5]

We had this very same issue on my partners Vista laptop - local network was fine on wifi but internet was dead. Plug in a cable and everything was good. It had me totally stumped for quite a while and I eventually gave up on it and told her just to use the wire.

Took another look at it again recently and after more head scratching, pinging, LAN access etc I figured that the hardware must be ok so drilled down and got the hardware details for it. Googled the symptoms and it turned out to be a duff driver for the wifi device which meant that it would not work with encryption (WEP was ok but anything else was a no-no). When I tested this myself it matched - open or wep connection and it was fine but as soon as I used a normal connection the internet was dead. Updated the drivers and all was good.

Thats the only time I've ever had defective drivers that needed replacing in 17 years.

[#6]

Upgrading the drivers would be a last resort but it may be the answer. It's been fine though since the update to 10  until a couple of days ago

[#7]

Could the 'few days ago' be the time at which the 1611 update to Windows 10 was installed?  Have you tried running a check on the hard drive?  Corrupt files cause issues more frequently than people realise and chkdsk can often recover them and cordon-off the bad sector of the disk.  

[#8]

Its a distinct possibility. I have asked what versionof10 hes running but its difficult getting this. Going to take a better look at the weekend. thanks

[#9]

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@ReedRichards wrote:

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So avoiding the use of the Plusnet DNS servers.  Why is that?

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Sorry for my late reply. We're aware of a known problem with a recent Windows 10 update (the anniversary update, I think) and the Plusnet DNS servers. We're working on a fix.

[Edit]

It appears to just affect Technicolor/Thomson routers, though.

[#10]

All models, or just recent ones? My brother still has a rather ancient Plusnet Thomson 585 ADSL router.

[#11]

That is ancient. I think all, but I may be wrong. Is he experiencing problems with Windows 10?

[#12]

Not that I know of, but I will doubtless hear if he does! Always useful to be prepared.

[#13]

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@ReedRichards wrote:

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@Anoush wrote:

I would recommend setting the DNS server in his laptop as 8.8.8.8 for the preferred, and 8.8.4.4 for the alternate.

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So avoiding the use of the Plusnet DNS servers.  Why is that?

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Because the Google DNS IP addresses are easier to remember and type!

[#14]

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@Anoush wrote:

That is ancient. I think all, but I may be wrong. Is he experiencing problems with Windows 10?

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If it's the same issue as this, then it only affects the 582n with version 10.x firmware.

[#15]

Hmm, I'm not entirely sure myself what causes the problem, but I have seen Thomson TG585 both v7 and v8 routers affected with data transfer issue using Windows 10. And, resolved the issue by changing the DNS servers.