[Greg McKaskle]

This week I saw a number of laptops that were difficult to get attached to the field. It wasn't a Windows 8 issue, though there was some speculation that it was involved.

The field requires that the laptop be set to 10.te.am.05 and subnet of 255.0.0.0 on the LAN adapter. If the subnet is wrong, you may hear from the field, but the field will not hear you back and the FMS lights will show your DS as a red dot. It must be .05 or the field will info will not get to you.

Some computers had like half a dozen wireless adapters in the control panel. Disabling the adapters is a good start, but you would then go to configure the LAN and Windows would warn that something else was already on .05. The dialog was confusing and Yes wouldn't apply and it wasn't clear if No did or not.

You may want to use IPConfig to verify that the settings of the LAN are correct after pressing No on the dialog.

To avoid the dialog, please visit the wireless adapter(s) and change them so they are not .05 before disabling. To make matters more confusing. One laptop dialog referred to a VPN adapter that wasn't present in the control panel.

Greg McKaskle