It was in a hotel in the Netherlands and myself also on holiday sitting outside. At the reception there was a woman complaining that she doesn't get Internet connection. As I noticed the situation I went there to find out what's going on.
After telling about my qualification I could take a look at that laptop. It was in French, a language where I'm just familiar with the basics and the user also didn't have admin permissions.
So I checked if the WiFi connection was actually working and also used ipconfig to look for the current IP address.
And it was an address from the 192.168 area. For that hotel it seemed quite unusual to me so I checked the IP address from my phone and it had an address from the 172.16. range. So my conclusion was: The IP address was manually changed on the laptop, but unfortunately I couldn't see it due to not having the needed permissions to see and change the network settings.
I asked for the asked password, but apparently she misunderstood. Language barrier. Finally she logged off and logged in with the admin account and she had the password! Now it was easy: I went to the network settings and I really saw that the network settings where manually changed to a 192.168 IP address.
I made a screenshot of the settings and changed the them to DHCP. The Windows laptop got a new IP address and Internet was working. The woman and the people at the reception were happy.
Obviously her husband made this change because their local network environment made it necessary: Like the laptop had trouble getting an IP address, their DHCP server isn't working or he just wanted to make sure that nobody else gets an IP address except the ones he would chose manually.
Anyway, it was probably too easy and not worth to mention, but these are such cases where basic users don't have any idea at all. It's better to help out if you can instead of people throwing their stuff unnecessarily away.
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