hp PC (Win 10) Will Not Connect to Airport Extreme

That is a fact.. win X wireless drivers are hopeless.

I recommend you download directly from Intel (or whoever is the OEM supplier of the wireless card but Intel is the top of the bad boy list), the latest drivers for your exact card. You will need to dig in the specs to get the exact model used or open the bottom hatch of the laptop and eyeball it.

No luck.. well you are not alone.. it is a crowded club .. Apple knows there are issues.. I doubt they are rushing out a firmware upgrade to fix it.

The best fix for now is to use a standard wireless AP (any wireless router will be fine).. plug it into your AE and set it for HP connectivity.. as well as other stray PC world devices that get ugly on apple routers.

There is nothing much in the apple to help.. you can fiddle with IPv6 settings.. that seems to help some.. but it is more like random events..

No problem helping out.

If your Linksys is old.. ie G wireless it is better to replace it.. A brand new TP-Link model like WR841HP is perhaps $40. The next model up.. WR1043ND should be around $60 and is faster chipset with gigabit. Wireless will be identical. Then AC model like C5 or C7. It is up to you what you want to spend.

There is no problem using a mixed wireless network.. I found it much better to do exactly that.

Apple router for the apples.. (Banana router for the Bananas 😁)

But you can start today with the old Linksys so you can get the HP on the network.

(Well you can do that already by ethernet of course) But if you want to use wireless.

Most of the linksys routers will not have an AP mode.. (that means just using router as access point). But all wireless routers can be used in a method called WAN BYPASS.

1. Plug the Linksys into the HP by ethernet.

2. Open the browser and go to the 192.168.1.1 (or whatever the IP.. but usually that one).

3. Change the IP address to the same range as the AE. Open your airport utility on a Mac to find this.

What you see here, will depend on the network setup.. If it is router on default it is easy.. The AE will be 10.0.1.1 but if it is bridged as mine is (almost) you will see any old strange IP.. take note of it.

We need to give the Linksys a fixed address. In my case I would pick 192.168.2.100 (making sure nothing else has that IP).

If your AE is default 10.0.1.1 then I would set linksys to 10.0.1.220.. or anything above 200 up to 254 will work.

Write this on a label and place it under the router.. along with username and password.. you will find you have to have the address in the future.

If you need help with this tell me the whole network layout. modem and router setup.

4. Setup with wireless in the Linksys as you like, with a different name from the AE.

5. Most important.. now turn off DHCP server. And actually this might be better done before step 3.

6. Plug LAN port of the Linksys to the LAN port of the AE.

It should now provide wireless to your HP but it is fully integrated into your network and you can communicate across all the clients as well as internet.

It is easier to double NAT.. but this fixes it so you have full network connectivity as well as internet.

I need the exact model.. telling me it is a Linksys is insignificant info.. I need which out of the thousands they made.

If it is WRT54G or GL these are very well known..

It is a simple matter of pressing the reset.. do it now.. press and hold the reset after the router has powered on for a few minutes.. press for about 15sec.. something should happen.. lights flash . main power led turns red or goes off. Then leave it powered on for another minute or two..

When it comes back up, it will come on in default factory mode as a router.

You are plugging it by ethernet into ANY computer.. I said the HP for no good reason..other than HP is the one you need to use to get on the network.. if you know Macs then plug it into a Mac..It is just that Apple in their decreasing wisdom no longer use ethernet ports on their laptops.. whereas an HP will have an ethernet port.

Type the IP into the browser and do the setup.. No internet is needed.. this is going to take you 2min at most to do the setup.. then you will disconnect it..

Plug it by ethernet exactly as I explained into the AE in the last step.. 6. You do not need any other wired connection.. LAN Linksys to LAN AE.. everything else will be wireless.

It is then used for wireless connection only by the HP .. nothing else needs use it.