Wireless Problems

gt568

espresso wrote:

How far away is the laptop from the router? Is there any pattern to these dropouts? i.e. a regular time. It could still be something local causing interference, even if it is not displayed by Netstumbler as that only looks for the 13 channels, can you think of anything else i.e. a neighbour etc?

Thank you for taking the time to reply, at the moment the router is about 4 feet away in the same room. The dropouts appear pretty random, there doesn't seem to be any set time between them, or any incident precipitating the disconnection. When it is connected it says signal strength is excellent. We live in a semi and the router is a fair distance away from next door and he is away travelling at the moment for 4 months, so I'm a bit stumped. I even completely reset the whole lot last night, but to no avail.

espresso

Sorry I can't think of anything else at the moment! I have setup several wireless networks and never experienced your wireless dropout problem before. The only other thing that may be worth trying is to force the router to transmit using 802.11b

Usually on the wireless settings page there is a mode setting i.e. Mixed = g or b, 802.11g only or 802.11b only. 802.11b works at 11Mb but it may be more tolerant, as it is working at a slower speed.

gt568

So maybe it could be next doors cordless phone or something?

espresso

gt568 wrote:

So maybe it could be next doors cordless phone or something?

Could be several things causing interference but the most common things are cordless phones, video senders, remote wireless cameras and even microwave ovens!

Best of luck with it anyway.

gt568

Incidently I noticed netstumbler said I only had WEP not WPA encryption but both windows and the router say WPA, does this mean I'm not as secure as I thought?

albertross_2

It's difficult for netstumbler to differentiate between wep and wpa, so it is just seeing it as scrambled. Nothing to worry about.

I'd try changing channels anyway, on the router, to say 13 or 8, see what happens.

gt568

albertross wrote:

It's difficult for netstumbler to differentiate between wep and wpa, so it is just seeing it as scrambled. Nothing to worry about.

I'd try changing channels anyway, on the router, to say 13 or 8, see what happens.

Ok thats a relief about the encryption. How do I go about changing the channel? Sorry to ask for so much help, but wireless is a completely new area for me and I don't want to mess anything up.

albertross_2

It will be in the router config screen, http://192.168.1.1 or whatever the IP is.

gt568

albertross wrote:

It will be in the router config screen, http://192.168.1.1 or whatever the IP is.

Thanks, do I need to change anything on the laptop settings? and should I do it through the wired connection?

albertross_2

It's not essential to do it on the PC, but you could try it if you are still having problems, set it to the same channel (view wireless networks, advanced, configure).. Have you set the PC to only connect to your network, and only use infrastructure mode? If not, see the section in these links starting with "Assuming"

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=2471408&postcount=37

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=2471410&postcount=38


You can do the changes wirelessly, it will just drop the connection (and hopefully reconnect) when you hit apply/save.