Go easy on me, as I don't know what I'm talking about here

but……

My wife's work laptop can find and connect to our internet connection, But we have to disable the LAN proxy settings for us to get it to work, she doesn't want to do it this way, as she says she'll forget.

Is there a way of getting the internet working without messing with settings?

Paul & Donna, confused

not without setting up a a VB script and running that from the browser, could get complex.

Best bet I would say is if you can, install another browser. So leave internet explorer as her work browser but when she's at home she can use firefox or safari.

You could also create a shortcut to a script on her desktop which can be clicked to enable/disable the proxy settings.

This chap has suggested ways of doing both these scripting methods but I'd really recommend going down the alternative browser path first.

http://sharpreflections.wordpress.com/2007/03/12/scripting-ie-proxy-configuration/

Cheers

Thing is it won't connect at work either, she has to plug a network cable in

the proxy ip adress is also listed in exceptions with an * at the end of the address, as well as cachepilot. My wife is a teacher, so I think their connection is heavily guarded.

will altering the LAN proxy settings prevent here wired connection from working?

you should be able to do this with firefox? AFAIK (at least on a Mac) it has separate 'network' settings from the pc/mac so can connect independently from the system-wide LAN/internet settings. I use this at work to test our systems by having my Network location using our office UK based proxy and Firefox connecting via our US proxy.

Or am I missing something. Admittedly I'm a DBA / web designer rather than sysadmin / network engineer and I can't say PC's are my speciality either so I may have it arse-backwards.

It's hard to say without knowing what her network is like. It may be wireless passes over a different path, the proxy may not be available via wireless. Typically education authorities utilise a centralised proxy shared with the council or some such. Certainly with the ones I've done work for, the wired network is heavily guarded to ensure students can't browse porn and the wireless is fairly open, so the staff can. 😉

Placing the proxy in the exceptions list is a waste of time, it could only be of use to the admin staff who need to access it directly for management.

Thanks all. I think she's just going to go with thurning the proxy settings off as needed.

Bit of a faff though

what you want is something to sit in the system tray like this

not used it myself as i've only got firefox on my pc's

Cheers all!

Assuming her work LAN is domain-based then her IT dept should be able to control this via group policy, so "in work" and "out of work" use different settings. I use this to enforce tight secrity policies on our company laptops when they're out of the office and I'm pretty sure the same method can be applied to browser connection settings.