[pollyh]

i have a belkin router connected by cable to my PC - this is superb. My son connects just fine by card from the room next door but the PC downstairs wont find it hardly ever and this new laptop has mpbs signal strength that jumps all over the place from 54 to 11. It always says it has excellent strength but never has. Can hardly ever connect even when I put the laptop next to the router. This is driving me mad. Please could you keep it very simple as I am far from being a tekki ! Thanks.

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Try rescanning for wireless network and then check for link quality. If you house is built of solid bricks etc, it would be hard for the wireless signal to travel too far. Or if you have a cordless telephone which is located downstairs, this will make it even more difficult for the card to pick up the signal. the connection speed usually doesn't matter too much unless it's dropped all the way down to 11 mbps.

[MeowMeow]

Try rescanning for wireless network and then check for link quality. If you house is built of solid bricks etc, it would be hard for the wireless signal to travel too far. Or if you have a cordless telephone which is located downstairs, this will make it even more difficult for the card to pick up the signal. the connection speed usually doesn't matter too much unless it's dropped all the way down to 11 mbps.

[pollyh]

Thank you. The house is wood and tin foil so that makes sense !! We have 2 lines for phone both are cordless so that makes sense too. My concern is the new laptop. it wont hold signal at all and is virtually impossible to use on the net. My thinking is that either it is faulty or I just have a bad connection. I jsut dont understand which.

[MeowMeow]

when u bring the laptop much closer to the router and scan for network, what does it say?

[pollyh]

sorry to br thick dont understand scan for network - it just does it and a sign comes up on my laptop stating it is now connected.

[MeowMeow]

go to start->control panel-> (if you have a blue control panel background, click on swtich to classic view)-> network connections. rite click on the wireless network connection and then choose view available wireless network. you should be able to find a list of the networks that you're in range with. check for signal strenght /link quality of your network.

[pollyh]

Ok on the computer that is attached by cable to the router it says LAN which has a strength of 100pbps and on the 1394 thingy it has a strength of 400mbps

when I go to the laptop it has the LAN disconnected and the 1394 as 400mbps and a third stating wireless network connection as 36mbps.

Does this help or have I messed up ?
P

[MeowMeow]

you should be able to see green bars representing signal strength, can u tell me how many green bars is on?

[pollyh]

The computer does not show green bars - but then again I have no problem with that one and it is attached by cable. The laptop at this moment in time is showing all bars as green When it goes down to 48, or 24 or 11 or 8 I would have thought the bars got but they dont seem to. It flashed from 54 at the best to 2 at the worst rapidly and randomly.

Edited by pollyh, 29 June 2006 - 08:28 AM.

[MeowMeow]

go to start->control panel-> (if you have a blue control panel background, click on swtich to classic view)-> network connections. rite click on the wireless network connection and then choose view available wireless network. you should be able to find a list of the networks that you're in range with. check for signal strenght /link quality of your network.

can u do that on ur laptop pls, while bringing it close to the router

[pollyh]

doesnt make a blind bit of difference to wireless network connection the 1394 doesnt have bars.

[MeowMeow]

i actually never mentioned 1394 =.=" i said... wireless network connection....

[pollyh]

it doesnt make a blind bit of difference to wireless connection

[Dan]

Hi pollyh,

Generally speaking (although not all the time ) a faulty / failing wireless adapter will either have a constantly weak signal, or an erratic signal; however, sitting the laptop beside the router should make a noticeable improvement in performance. Since you did not notice any improvement, I'd say that you'd need to look elsewhere. That said, faulty adapters don't exactly follow a set of guidelines on how to break, so there's always the possibility that it is a faulty adapter. If you can borrow another adapter from friends / relatives to test out on your computer, it would be fantastic.. But chances are that you won't be that lucky

Along with this, wireless is a fairly dynamic thing. You have a lot of other devices in your home that use wireless as well, that can talk to each other even when they are not in use. If you (or your neighbours!) have cordless phones, a security alarm, baby monitors, and a whole host of other things, they can cause your connection to either become unstable or just drop. To attempt to prevent these interferences, you can opt to change your router's broadcasting channel, so that it operates on a different channel, and hopefully avoids the interference. If your router is setup to transmit at channel 1, change it to 6 and test it, then try 11. To change your router's broadcasting channel, you will need to login to your router's web console. To do this, type the IP Address of your router into your Internet Browsers address bar -- if you don't know your router's IP, goto Start --> Run --> type CMD and press OK --> then type: IPCONFIG /ALL --> look for Default Gateway; this will be the IP Address of your router. You will then be prompted for your username/password, which you will hopefully know. Once logged in you'll need to find a section dedicated to Wireless Settings; look for a Broadcasting Channel (it's usually a drop-down box), and then try changing the channels as suggested above. Be sure to check for any improvement.

Has this wireless adapter ever worked well on this network?

[pollyh]

Thank you I wil try that. The router is superb on the PC that is attached by cable. It works well in the room next door by card but it is very poor downstairs on another card arttached PC - but that might be the house construction.
The issue is the laptop and the variances of signal are huge and speedy. Placing the laptop near the router does not help. Since the laptop is a new purchase I was just wondering if it is faulty or if it really is just signal problems. I am away this weekend and will take the laptop with me. Friends have a router that works well in their house. I will let you know how things went.
Thanks for your help.