Hotel Internet WiFi No Login Page
Long story short, if you are trying to connect a laptop to the wifi at a hotel and the login page does not come, up:
Try downloading and installing the latest wifi driver from your computer vendors support web site.
If that fails then call the hotel reception and ask for the direct number to their IT support so you can work it out with a trained technician, as there are many other potential problem areas.
Background
There are plenty of articles explaining what do if you cannot connect your laptop to the hotel wifi, yet you can connect your laptop at home. Why is this?
In my case I had checked all sorts of configuration settings. Is the browser set to a proxy, or is your ipV4 ip address set manually in the wireless device, and so on.
All my network settings were good yet I still could not connect. I ran the "ipconfig /all" command and the ip address was configured correctly to the hotels router yet I could not get an internet connection. Just an error from the browser saying no DNS connection, which wasn't really true strictly speaking.
I remembered that I had previously reinstalled windows on my laptop and when you do that windows installs all the default plug and play drivers. This is a problem really in that the vendor drivers are usually the best ones to use.
I have a few HP laptops and whenever I have weird problems I find that installing the vendor driver mysteriously fixes it. For example, I recently replaced a laptop battery with a new third party battery and not long after that the screen would remain blank after coming out of sleep mode. I then installed the vendors video driver and the problem went away.
I could not properly connect to the hotel wifi until I had downloaded and installed the HP driver for my wifi card, then like magic, I was able to connect without errors.
When doing diagnostics there is a general high level sequence to follow. First check your O/S version. Is it limited in some way, for example windows 8.1 has network limitations that windows 8.1 professional doesn't - the think tank at MS is amazing (...not...), then check your configuration, then check your drivers, and finally when all else fails, check the hardware.
It took me a while to realize that my diagnostics was stuck in the configuration domain. It would have been far quicker to install the vendor wifi driver from the get go, but it is often a configuration issue that causes problems so its the usual place to start looking. Either way, its a process of elimination.
I think that next time if I spend more than 20 minutes checking configuration I am going to download the vendor driver. The moral of the story? If you reinstall windows always download and install the latest vendor drivers, lest you get bitten years later...
