# How do i know if my wireless internet is getting blocked by firewall?



## yztwofiftyf (Aug 13, 2009)

Hello, i have a toshiba laptop, running windows vista. With a windows firewall and IE, so when i open a game, crossfire for example, and then pop open a internet page to check my email or do some school work...my game loses connection, and than everything wont load, down at the bottom right where it should show 2 computers with a planet earth, it shows 1 with a yellow triangle and inside it is an exclamation point. So it says limited access or something and then it will reconnect when i pull up a webpage again after i close everything and wait for a bit. It's really annoying as i have to plug the ethernet cable in straight from the modem to my laptop. And as to the firewall blocking my wireless, do you think it is? And how do i let it through..
The router is a NETGEAR WIRELESS-N 150 ROUTER WNR1000
Thanks

Ok, so i was just surfing the web and my page froze, i had to close it and popped it back up and it stayed white, so i closed it again and had to wait like 15 seconds for google to come up. And i had that yellow triangle again.. so its not just when im running games.... so annoying! :upset:


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## yztwofiftyf (Aug 13, 2009)

Does nobody know the answer? =\


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## johnwill (Sep 26, 2002)

I can't imagine this being a firewall. With a firewall, you either have a connection or you don't.

Are you sure this isn't wireless interference?


Download and run this Xirrus Wi-Fi Inspector, paste a screen shot of the main screen here.


To post a screen shot of the active window, hold the _*Alt*_ key and press the *PrtScn* key. Open the Windows PAINT application and _*Paste*_ the screen shot. You can then use PAINT to trim to suit, and save it as a JPG format file. To upload it to the forum, open the full reply window and use the _*Manage Attachments*_ button to upload it here.


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## yztwofiftyf (Aug 13, 2009)

Alright, here it is.


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## yztwofiftyf (Aug 13, 2009)

Ok, so now i get limited access when it disconnects, thats what it says. And just a while ago it completely stopped working it told me that it couldnt identify it so i had to restart my computer, man this is really frusterating.


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## johnwill (Sep 26, 2002)

Sounds like something running on the computer is affecting the networking.


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## yztwofiftyf (Aug 13, 2009)

Well if it matters, i had a similar problem before we got a new router, about a month ago a comcast worker came out and replaced our router with a brand new and completely different one, because the previous one would cut out and just lose connection, forcing us to shut off, and restart the router. That was random, THIS problem does it at random, but a lot more than it use to and you don't have to restart the router, it automatically gets the connection back after 1 minute or 2. But the problem wont go away. As for a program running? It would have to be running on both of our laptops. Because they both do it, and when it's plugged in it doesn't lose connection.
Where do i go from here? Can you help with this problem or not? Do i have to contact comcast and make them come out here and fix it or is it a simple problem that i'm just not getting..


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## djaburg (May 15, 2008)

It could actually be a couple of things. In my experience, most intermittent outages as you've described are cause by the home owner using 2.4Ghz cordless phones, a failing router, or a neighbor with a wireless router broadcasting on the same channel. Since you've recently had your router replaced we'll pretend like that's not the case. If you or your neighbors (most apparent in apartments, townhomes, condos, or any other scenario where you have very close proximity) are using 2.4Ghz phones, they can interfere with your wireless as can another wireless router in close proximity. With the phone, if it's yours, you typically can change the channel it's working on. Same thing with wireless routers. You can try changing channels on the router to see if that corrects the issue. It seems that most routers are set to work on channel 6 by default, but they usually will have at least 11 channels. I'd choose something different to see if that helps. The fact that you can stay connected via cable indicates that it's something interfering with the wireless signal.


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## yztwofiftyf (Aug 13, 2009)

Ok, it seems to have worked. But is there any way to test it?


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## yztwofiftyf (Aug 13, 2009)

yztwofiftyf said:


> Ok, it seems to have worked. But is there any way to test it?


I changed the channel on the phone, but it just disconnected again about 5 minutes ago, darn!


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