Losing wireless connection

If your work problem is interference, a different card would not help.  If compatability, the new card could also suffer if the router WAP needs a firmware update.

Your home office problem was interference from either a 2.4ghz phone or another wireless router on the same channel or both.  At work it sounds like either the same interference or an incompatability issue with the WAP that a firmware update to the router could solve, if you can talk them into doing it.

In my other thread... changing the channel didn't do anything. Also, the ONLY other 2.4GHz products in my house are bluetooth products. However, again, my TM1300 never had problems, ONLY the 2200BG. FOR ME, it came down to drivers. For MANY others, NOTHING works.

Well, I finally decided to call Dell Technical Support. Didn't think they would be able to help in this situation from what had been said in all the threads. The RESOLUTION we came up with was pretty profound. They had me install the LATEST 2200BG drivers (9.0.0.61) AND use the Intel PROSet/Wireless software to monitor the wireless network card.  At first I was very reluctant because of the problems that were mentioned in the other forum threads. ALL the problems went away. So far it's been 8 hours WITHOUT a disconnect.  Both locations, home and office, are WORKING fine.

lol

:smileyvery-happy:

Count yourself lucky... such steps didn't work for me.

I'm also a new member of the 2200BG haters' club.

I'm having the same problem as a lot of people -- the connection drops every minute or two. (It might be better described as "droops" -- I don't appear to be getting a complete disconnect, but have 5-10 second stretches where packets are lost and the driver seems to be dropping the speed in hopes of establishing a solid connection.)

One other note -- the same hardware in the same system using Linux and the ipw2200 open-source drivers is rock-solid.

It sure seems like the Intel drivers are just hopelessly busted. (The 8.x series and the other tricks mentioned in this and related threads haven't helped me.)

Replying to my own thread.

I decided to try one additional thing for completeness, and it appears to have solved my problem. I have been pinging my router's IP address continually for 20 minutes with no packet loss. Previously, doing the same thing would have me lose 2-3 packets every minute or two with an overall 1% packet loss.

cademetz mentions that using the "8.x" drivers from Intel worked for him. There are actually *TWO* different "8.x" drivers available from their download site (8.0.12.20000 and 8.1.0.28) with corresponding versions of their ProSet tools. I had previously tried 8.1.0.28 without success, and retried it earlier today, also without success. I had also used the 9.1.0.9 drivers, also without success.

I just tried the older one (8.0.12.20000). I installed the driver and let the ProSet tool manage the connection. I set the power management settings to "Manual / Maximum Performance" and have the transmission power set to 100%. Other than that, I am using the defaults. I have not tried switching over to having Windows XP manage the connection, and am probably not going to mess with it.

The older driver/ProSet has a very different user interface from the newer one. It also provides considerably more detailed statistics on the "Troubleshooting" tab. The "stats" provided by other driver versions and from Microsoft are basically useless.

Interestingly, this driver is reporting only "good" signal quality -- 3 bars out of 5 -- the MS and other Intel drivers were reporting "excellent". My router (Linksys WRT54G w/ Sveasoft firmware) is about 10 feet away with a direct line of sight. The speed reported on the main tab is wobbling between 24 and 54 Mbps. Having a stable connection is way more important to me than getting 100% of the available bandwidth, especially since my upstream bandwidth is way less than 24Mbps.

In case you want to try it, I downloaded the 8.0.12.20000 driver from:

http://support.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb/CS-010623.htm

I tried what w4c did (install the newest 2200BG drivers) and everything looks good so far (30 minutes without dropping).  Intel's software automatically detects that XP is managing the wireless connections, and I opted to let Intel's shut down XP's, and everything has been okay.

Also I noticed that the 8.0xxxxx drivers weren't up on Intel's site, but my XP Inspiron was already running that version (and dropping frequently).

Cheers,
Dave