Strange wireless problem

[JD50]

Ok, here is the background. I have been using a comcast linksys wireless gateway for the last month or so with absolutely no problems. I live in a 3 story townhouse and I have had the gateway in my basement, and I would get reception just fine even in my bedroom on the 3rd floor. Then the other day, my wireless no longer works. The only way that I could get a connection was if I was sitting right next to the router in the basement, and even then it was intermittent. This is on a gateway laptop running windows XP MCE with an Realtek internal usb wireless adapter.

After going to best buy and buying a new router and an external PCMCIA wireless adapter, I am still having issue. Both the router and the card are Netgear rangemax super G. I moved my router up to my middle floor, and sitting about 10 feet away from the router I get a "very low" signal strength, it still says that its connected at 108 mbps but it takes forever to download anything. If I move right next to my router then it says "good" signal strength.

I'm getting very very frustrated, I work in IT (although not with wireless) so I have somewhat of an idea of what I am doing, but I have tried everything (I think) and I can't get this to work. I did not change anything from the day it was working to the day it stopped working. I can't even connect to the router using my onboard wireless, I have to use the card. I would really appreciate any help you guys could give. Let me know if you need any more info. Thanks in advance.

 

[spidey07]

Sounds like interferrance.

Change the channel on your wireless router to 1, 6, or 11 to see if you can get a more stable connection.

 

[JD50]

I found some newer drivers for my PC card, now I get a strong signal, but the netgear software is saying that the connection is around 30-40 Mbps, but the windows network connection icon in the system tray says that its a solid 108 Mbps.

As far as changing the channel goes, I can't do it if I want it to run at 108 Mbps, it has to be on channel 6.

 

[JackMDS]

What ever these indicators say does not mean anything.

http://www.ezlan.net/wbars.html

Measure the actual Bandwidth by doing File transfer.

 

[Jeep4JB]

Originally posted by: JD50
I found some newer drivers for my PC card, now I get a strong signal, but the netgear software is saying that the connection is around 30-40 Mbps, but the windows network connection icon in the system tray says that its a solid 108 Mbps.

As far as changing the channel goes, I can't do it if I want it to run at 108 Mbps, it has to be on channel 6.

I've never seen a wireless router that forced you to run a certain channel in order to get the advertised bandwidth. Besides it sounds like that may be what Windows is reporting as the speed but based on the problems you described, that doesn't sound to be the case. Did you change the default SSID and have you used Netstumbler to see if there are other wifi networks running on the same channel in your area?