Inspiron and 1350 card issues

hi, to rule a couple of possible problems first, if you right click on the dell wireless WLAN card utility on the system tray and click open utility, whilst the 1350 is in - click the site monitor tab, when your network appears click advanced to view the signal strength.  is the signal strength dropping or staying constant up until the connection drops out?

also i presume you have XP2 there are significant improvement native wireless support in SP2.

could you advice if you are WPA or WEP encryption on the network.

regards ian

The signal strength is steady until a few seconds before the connection drops, then will fluctuate a bit.

No SP2 yet.

WEP is being used.

OK, interesting test...

Removed 1350, added PCMCIA Linksys card. Ran for a while without trouble, but eventually network failed. This time, network remained visible, but could not re-connect. No trouble disabling and re-enabling adapter, but still unable to connect. As before, reboot fixed it.

Upgraded to SP2. No change in behaviour, just prettier screens telling me it could not connect.

Removed PCMCIA card, replaced 1350. Changed security from WEP to WPA-Shared Key. It's been running now for a few hours, no problems encountered.

So maybe a problem with XP and WEP?

I have a similar problem on my Inspiron 1150 with the 1350 mini wireless card.

My LAN has a Linksys WRT54G v2 wireless router that connects the 1150 computer to the LAN via the 1150's 1350 card.

I have all of the Dell software drivers at their current level, as well as the latest 1150 A06 BIOS insralled. The router has its latest drivers, and I am using the latest driver for the 1350 card in the 1150.

I suspect that this issue, which I have seen other report, might be due to software unrelated to the wireless connectivity interfering with the 1350 card. I suspect this may be the case because my 1150 loses wireless connectivity under two common conditions:

1. When transfeerring a set of 500 MB segmented Ghost 2002 files making up a Drive C: image of the 1150 to a computer on the LAN, EITHER via the wireless connection OR by the direct WIRED Ethernet LAN connector on the 1150. What happens is at some point the LAN folders of the PCs on the LAN become inaccessible and the copy fails (after about 3-5 500 MB files are copied). If I use Fn+F2 to disable wireless card, however, all file copies via the Ethernet card connection work without fail. Copies as noted tend to fail on either wired or wireless paths, and the wired copy path will fail if the wireless card is on.

2. The wireless connectivity AND Ethernet connectivity are lost almost without fail, so to specak, whenever a file of more than a megabyte or so is downloaded from the web using the 1150, with a save-to-location on the wired LAN, if I do the download with Mozilla Firefox. No such failure occurs if Internet Explorer is used in the same way. This implies the role of software as a probable cause, it seems to me.

I can't help wondering therefore whether this might be an issue of other processes or applications succeeding in breaking the wireless connectivity, possibly by causing some kind of fatal delay in the wireless card that causes it to lose track of things. Perhaps it is a timing fault of some kind, wherein the 1350 card is hypersensitive to other applications sharing time with it.

A software interaction fault seems to make sense as well because this problem seems to appear over time--a time period in which the user is also typically installing more other software over time. This may imply a correlation between the problem and the presence of other software competing for CPU time.

Also interesting. Your wireless router is similar to mine, a Linksys WRK54G.

Well, problems not solved...

after working awhile, sure enough, connections dropping again. At one point, I checked the services, and found that the Windows Zero Configuration service had stopped. However, I only saw that happen once.

Since changing to WPA, connections eventually re-establish, but it can take several minutes, and evntually will stop reconnecting at all.

is the network running stable now with WPA encryption?

Seen this before many times... it's your windows zero wireless config utility... there was a known issue in regards to SSIDs which were not broadcasted- the zero config utility would not accpet it even though it was on your preferred list. If I remember correctly you have to uninstall everything related to your wireless card and rebuild the configuration from scratch. Also noticed something about a Linksys PCMCIA card in your post ( although skimmed over it ) Linksys has issues with their newer drivers... use the drivers that came with the card on the CD. Other things I've found in the past are things like cordless phone interference etc.

interesting feedback on the linksys...we run quite a few netcomm wireless routers at work...a colleage brought in a linksys wireless router (it was NOT connected to our network, just a standalone setup)...switched it on and it caused all the laptops connected by wireless to the netcomm units to drop out!

i have never seen anything like this before....perhaps they should rename it a linksys disruptor instead of router...when i figure out what happend i'll post it here