Poor signal strength to laptop

deferred_pensioner

Hi
I have ready the sticky and the relevant looking FAQ’s but couldn’t find anything to help me hence this post.

We have just bought a laptop for my wife to use throughout the house whilst our main PC is in the office at the top of the house.

The router is BT Home Hub 2 connected to my PC by Ethernet (I think).

The house is largish old thick walls etc.

The laptop does connect wirelessly whilst upstairs near the router so I know it “works” but has no signal or “very poor” downstairs it even detects our neighbours either side but yet again a poor signal.

Is there anything I can do downstairs to boost the signal.?

Showing my age and lack of IT knowledge here but is there anything I can buy to plug into the telephone socket downstairs that would help ,another router perhaps .

Thanks
David

pcombo

you could try buying a bigger wifi antenna for the router.

Norant

Hello Mr Pensioner.


Not really sure how to answer your question,however sometimes i get a strong signal and sometime i get a weak signal,i get a yellow triangle in the task bar with a red exclamation mark on it saying signal strength is low.

Do you get the bad signal all of the time?

espresso

Locate the Home Hub downstairs where you want to use the laptop using WiFi and run an Ethernet cable up to the office PC.

JasX

pcombo wrote: »

you could try buying a bigger wifi antenna for the router.

This being MSE you could also dust off the old blue peter 'sticky back plastic' skills and knock one of these up for next to nothing.... I've had some very good results with one fixing coverage issues at my parents house

http://airfart.blogspot.com/2008/03/antenna-booster-windsurfer.html

espresso

pcombo wrote: »

you could try buying a bigger wifi antenna for the router.

JasX wrote: »

This being MSE you could also dust off the old blue peter 'sticky back plastic' skills and knock one of these up for next to nothing.... I've had some very good results with one fixing coverage issues at my parents house

http://airfart.blogspot.com/2008/03/antenna-booster-windsurfer.html

The BT Home Hub does not have an external aerial.

:rolleyes:

gonzo127

well you can get wireless extenders however these are not always easy to set up and in the greater scheme of things are quite expensive however they might be worth while for your situation

deferred_pensioner

Thanks to everyone for the fantastic quick response.

As pointed out the BT router does not have an external aerial so the Blue Peter idea will not work.

Running an Ethernet cable from downstairs would be a mammoth length my office is two floors up even if I ran it up the outside of the house being the shortest route it would be approximately 50 ft long.

Again showing my ignorance the is a USB port in back of the router is this of any use..

Also ,and I know it goes against the ethos of this site, is there a better stronger router I could buy to replace my BT router.?

Any suggestions much appreciated.

Thanks again
David

Fifer

espresso wrote: »

Locate the Home Hub downstairs where you want to use the laptop using WiFi and run an Ethernet cable up to the office PC.

Or a pair of Homeplug adaptors if you can't or don't want to run a cable upstairs.

If you want to improve the wireless signal throughout the property, you can use a Homeplug wireless access point in place of one of the adaptors. That provides a wired and wireless solution for not much more money and worked perfectly for me.

savemoney

How about a homeplug connected to it via enternet and then another to upstairs you can get them that extend wireless

http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/Shop/ShopDetail.asp?ProductID=8235

espresso

deferred_pensioner wrote: »

Running an Ethernet cable from downstairs would be a mammoth length my office is two floors up even if I ran it up the outside of the house being the shortest route it would be approximately 50 ft long.

You can easily get made up Ethernet cables e.g. 20M for £4.37 first Google hit here and this is by far the best option as presumably the office is fixed. This is a money saving site, so although Homeplugs could be used, they are not necessary, would cost much more and even use electricity constantly.