Please help! Can't maintain connection anywhere!

[ichin612]

I have no idea what the problem here is and have racked my brain and the brains of my friends. New to this forum, hoping that you experienced wifi users can point me in the right direction.

Equipment:
Toshiba MX35 laptop with Win XP Home(I know, soon to be XP Pro)

D link Airplus G wireless card bundled with a D link wireless router

The laptop and wireless card are totally new to me. Never owned a laptop before. Got this one as a special from Best Buy for Black Friday, hence the lack of integrated wifi.

The issue is, being able to maintain connectivity. At home it connects right up, but even sitting right in front of the router, I get dropped. Not so much with browsing but with Trillian, my chat program. Almost every 5 minutes, I get booted. I changed channels on the router and it did seem to help a little. But even in the same room as the router, I can't maintain a connection. I do have a 2.4Ghz phone, same as the router, but the base station is 20 feet away through a wall.

But, not only am I so lucky as to have connectivity issues at home, but the lucky ass I am, school is also a problem. My school, UCF has wireless all over campus for students. All you have to do is register your mac address and you're set. Well I did that today and I still have the same issues. Signal is good, where I am now, but browsing and chatting is not happening with any sort of consistency.

Things I have tried is an attempt to fix it myself:

Changed channels on the router.

Changed MTU settings.

Changed TCP receive window settings(per a friends recommendation)


I also sat next to my friend here at school and she gets full strength signal, no browsing or chatting issues on her Dell.

I just hope this deal I got on the pc and router/card wasn't too good to be true.

[C_Burns]

You mentioned a 2.4 ghz phone. I install wireless systems in hotels (among other facilities) for a living. Last year a particular hotel chain had 2.4 ghz phones in their hotels. While standing at the front counter I could pick up the phone and turn it on ( get a dialtone ) and watch the signal drop as much as 70% on my wireless signal indicator on my laptop. This may or may not be your problem.
Another thing to consider is microwave ovens have been known to cause "drops" as well.
I know this may not be the most "technical" answer but it could be a possibility.

[ichin612]

Thanks so much for replying. As far as the phone, I unplugged it and monitored the signal and still had the problem. So i figured that that was not it. With the microwave, from what I know, interference is only a problem when the microwave is in use and even then, only for a radius of about 10 feet. I have so far gone back to Best Buy and exchanged the Dlink for another and still have the same problem! I hoped that Best Buy would let me swap it out for a Linksys bundle even-steven, but no luck. So as for right now, I have a Netgear on it's way to me. Hopefully it will work better. Thanks again for actually answering my post.

[wirelessoceans]

Ichi,

Its probably not the router if this happens at school also. Is is more than likely the settings of your windows client manager.
I couldnt tell you exactly what try advanced setoing under the wireless networks tab, but its either that or the wireless card. Good luck