E1705 Laptop Wireless connection problems

Question

My wife has an E1705 laptop running Windows XP, service pack 3 with a Dell wireless minicard. The computer uses Windows to manage the wireless connection, not the minicard driver/conifguration software. She has for the past few months been unable to reilably connect to our home wireless network. She CAN, however, connect to our neighbor's NetGear network without any problem. Our router is a Linksys WRT310N. All other computers on the network (2 Windows XP systems using wired Ethernet, 2 Windows XP systems using wireless, 1 system using Ubuntu Linux v8.04, and 2 TiVo boxes) have no problems connecting or staying connected. ISP is our local cable company.   Symptoms of the problem include: 1) Wireless connection utility shows both our Linksys network and our neighbor's NetGear network show up in the Available Connections window (along with several other secured wireless networks)  2) Initially, she could connect to our network but the connection would suddenly drop out for no apparent reason 3) Now, she is unable to connect to our network at all, although she can still connect to our neighbor's NetGear network w/o any problems.   We have tried the following (none of which worked) 1) Disabled then re-enabled the Windows Zero Configuration service  2) Booted under Safe mode and installed only the wireless card driver  3) Disabled all the protection software (firewall, virus scan, and anti-spyware)   The only other thing we can think of to try is to install the PCMCIA wireless card in one or the other systems into the 1705 and trying to connect that way - but not sure if that will cause problems because of the built-in wireless card.   Any help would be MUCH appreciated. This is driving us totally batty....   Thanks, Merrill

volcano11 · Answer

By trying a PC Card wireless adapter you can determine if it is software configuration problem or a hardware problem with the built in card. Temporarily install the PC Card adapter and turn of the internet card using the Fn F2 key combination and see if the PC card works. If it does, then it is not likely a software configuration problem.

Steve

jmwills · Answer

Sounds like nothing more than the nieghbor's signla is over powering yours. Connect to the router with a physcoal connection (cable) and chnage the broadcast channel to 11, save configuration and reboot the router.

See if this helps and also configure the card to only connect to perferred networks.

jmwills · Answer

You can use any DNS server. It doesn't has to come form your ISP. Look at the information at DNS.org and "Free DNS".

Looks liek your ISP's DNS server have a lot of stale DNS records. You can also run ipconfig /flushdns to purge your systems of the old records.

MerrillFromAla · Answer

Thanks for the input, guys. Here's an update......

We ran the diagnositcs that came with the wireless card, and found that the primary DNS supplied by our ISP was failing. For some reason, the computer wasn't falling throug to the secondary DNS. We were obtaining DNS's from our ISP rather than hard-coding. When we PINGed the IP address for the primary DNS (from 3 different computers), the PING failed. So we hard-coded the DNS address into the setup software, using only the known good DNS address - which leaves that computer with no secondary DNS.

We also contacted our ISP, who gave us a working DNS address to use. The support tech also put in a work order to have the "suspect" DNS server address checked out.

Now the only question we have is why the wireless software isn't falling through to the secondary DNS address when the primary one fails....

And so it goes.....

Thanks again,

Merrill

Networking, Internet, & Bluetooth

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