Error Message: Limited or No Connectivity aka Local Access Only

Posted on: May 17th, 2010

I’m starting a little series that explains the various, frequently encountered error messages on the computer.

The first one has to do with networking and internet access.

The “Limited or No Connectivity” is the wording used by Windows XP, while Vista and Windows 7 expresses the same thing by saying “Unidentified Network. Local Access Only”.

You could ask: What the hell this means?

In a nutshell it means that your computer couldn’t find or connect to a router.

A router is a component in your network that acts as a traffic cop and directs the traffic between and computers and the internet. For proper operation each computer on the network needs to receive a unique address (called IP address) from the router. When the computer started up it’s networking component is initialized it will try to communicate to the router in the network.

The computer basically sends out a broadcast message saying “I’m here! I need an address!”. And if everything goes well, the router replies back “Here you go. You are ’192.168.1.101′. ” and some more numbers necessary to make the connections. However if the computer does not receive a reply after 30 seconds or so, it’ll conclude that there’s no router and makes up an address for itself which will allow it to communicate with other computer in a router-less network (which is very rare!) And that’s when you will see the above messages.

If the computer is not able to access the router then it will not be able to access the internet either because the router is the gateway to the internet. It might be able to access other machines in the same network – hence the “Local Access Only” wording in the newer versions of Windows.

What can cause this phenomena? Here are some of the most common ones:

- Unresponsive Router. It might be just frozen up (they are running a miniature computer inside which is prone to freeze-ups too), or simply not “talking” at all.
- Incorrect wireless key entered. This happens with Windows XP – Vista and Win7 will tell you that the key is incorrect. XP will try to talk to the router using the wrong key and because of that it won’t be able to.
- Interference on the wireless band. If there’s too much interference around the computer it will have hard time communicating with the router.
- Partially broken wire in network cables. If a cable is not completely broken then it will give the appearance of having a connection but the data traffic is not getting through. A completely broken wire will be indicated by the message “Network Cable Unplugged”.
- Third Party Firewall software. In some rare cases I’ve seen firewall software actually blocking the communication between the computer and the router. This is a malfunction of the software, they are not supposed to do that.
- Corruption of network settings. Incorrect setting of the network adapter can prevent the communication to the router.
- Faulty network adapter.

So what you can do when you encounter this?

Here are the steps anyone can do which over 50% of the time resolves the issue:
- Restart your router. (most of them needs to be unplugged from the power and then replugged)
- If you are using hardwired connection: Check the cables for looseness and if you can, try a different network cable.
- If you are using wireless:
- make sure that the wireless key is correct.
- Check for possible interference (such as cordless phones in the 2.4Ghz range, microwave closeby, neighbor’s router closeby, etc).
- If you have third party firewall (McAfee, Norton, etc). Disable it temporarily and see if that resolves the issue.
- Restart your computer
- Restart other network components (if you have any), such as switches and hubs.

If none of these resolve the issue then call us. We can troubleshoot and fix your network problems.

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