[pscyber]

I recently moved, and had to return the wireless router provided by my old ISP. I dug up my 2-year-old-ish Linksys WRT350N (yes, if you read any forums, it's pretty universally reviled and advice is usually "run, do not walk, away from this piece of junk" - but it is already paid for, and now I'm really curious about a behavior I've never seen before, and can't adequately even wrap my head around:

The router regularly drops wireless connections after 5-10 minutes, BUT somehow, the way it does this seems to send a signal to the client device that messes up its wireless network adapter. I've never seen or heard of this before. Pretty reliably (OK, all 5 times I've tried it, so far), if I go to the device manager (WinXP, SP3, Dell Latitude D620), disable the wireless network adapter, then reenable it, it picks up the wireless connection again, immediately.

Just a curiosity, but a really intriguing one, to me, at least. Does anyone have an idea about how this could be happening?

For the record, I've updated the firmware to the most recent available (dated 05/11/2008), and wired connections to the router seem stable.

Thanks,

-- Peter

Edited by pscyber, 09 January 2011 - 11:46 AM.

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I don't see how this is even possible.
They're just waves at the end of the day, they don't physically attack anything.

The issue is more likely that with the adapter, as you say it's a piece of junk that would probably be a far better doorstop than it is a wireless adapter.

[Neil Jones]

I don't see how this is even possible.
They're just waves at the end of the day, they don't physically attack anything.

The issue is more likely that with the adapter, as you say it's a piece of junk that would probably be a far better doorstop than it is a wireless adapter.

[pscyber]

I'm not quite sure I understand your response - the wireless "adapter," built into my laptop, seems to work fine everywhere else, and would be relatively difficult to extract and use as a doorstop. It's the router / "access point" that seems to be doing odd things, and which could, conceivably, hold a door open.

I am, however, in complete sync with your lack of understanding of how the specific problem I'm describing could possibly occur. (It does occur to me that I had a similar question about my iPod, some time ago, when told that music, playlists, etc., could only be transferred from a computer to the iPod, not the other way around, but then realized that "favorites" transferred back the other way, and so there had to be a way for info to flow from the iPod to the computer/iTunes.)