wireless trouble!

[captfb]

Hello,
I am new here but looking for some help. I am assisting a friend set up a small wireless network at home! He is running a netgear mr314 cable/dsl router and two machines. One machine is wired via LAN cable to router and the other machine has a siemens 1024 wireless PCI card! The machine with the wireless PCI card is running win98se. The problem is that the wireless card will not see the router! The card in being seen by the machine but it keeps scanning over and over! I checked the settings of the router and everything is as it should be. The cable router is located under the desk and the pc is also located under a desk. The win98se machine does have AOL software installed and it refuses to be un-installed! Does anyone have any advice on what I should be looking for? I tried bringing the machine into the room (to eliminate environmental concerns) and the machine still would not see the router. For laughs I called siemens and the tech advised me to re-install TCP-IP. My friend does not care about the info on win98se machine and is open to a re-image. I had been thinking of just blowing the image away and starting over. I would however like to understand what could be going on here! Does anyone have any ideas? Also are there any wireless forums that I can look to for help? Thanks in advance for the assistance.

Captfb

[Albert]

I'm not familier with your equipment, so I can only give you some general ideas of some problems and solutions I've run in to. I'm running Windows 98 SE on all my machines. I have an Efficient Speedstream 5660 DSL router acting as the DHCP server, hooked up to a Linksys EZXS55W switch along with the ethernet card in my desktop and an SMC 2755W access point (set up as a DHCP client).

First, make sure the hardware is configured properly. The main things here are SSID, IP addresses, if WEP is used, maybe turbo mode or channels used, etc. Read your manuals, and netgear's website ( www.netgear.com ) might have some faq's and troubleshooting help. Netgear might also have some updated drivers, utilities, and firmware updates.

Second, make sure Windows is set up properly for networking. Protocols and clients installed and configured, and sharing enabled. See www.wown.com (among many) for lots of good info on this.

Third, make sure any software firewalls are either configured properly to let other computers on your lan in, or disable them temporarily while you troubleshoot other problems. See your firewall software documentation. I had a problem with this (Norton Internet Security) when I first set up my wired lan

Some tools that will help you are ping and winipcfg.

Now here's the problem I ran into. None of the above were a problem, but my new 802.11a PC card and access point wouldn't work. I could ping all the hardware except the laptop nic (which wasn't plugged in) from the desktop, but I couldn't ping anything from the laptop with the wireless adaptor. I only had TCP/IP protocol installed. When I installed the NETBEUI protocol the desktop and laptop could see each other, but I couldn't access the internet through my DSL router from the laptop. Everything worked fine when I plugged in the built in eternet nic in my laptop though, which it had done before I tried to install wireless.

The solution was to go into device manager and disable the onboard ethernet nic in the laptop. After I did that, wireless worked as advertised. I've got wireless DSL internet access and everything, and I'm only running TCP/IP protocol now. I guess Windows was still trying to use the ethernet nic after the wireless was installed. This is worth looking at if you have an ethernet card installed in the same machine you're trying to install wireless on.

One of the things I tried in sorting this mess out was replacing my desktop hard drive with an old one I had laying around, and doing a clean install of Windows and drivers. Needless to say, it didn't help in my case. But it was a LOT easier than wiping the regular hard drive and reinstalling everything.

Sorry if I sound like a newbie to all this, but I am. I hope this helps, and good luck.

Albert

[captfb]

It was an IRQ conflict! Thanks for the help!

[Albert]

I'm glad to hear you got the problem solved! I didn't think to mention the IRQ thing because I didn't have any resource conflicts reported by Windows. I think my problem is some kind of configuration problem between multiple NIC's that isn't real obvious, at least to me and apparently my vendor's tech support. I hope there's a better way, but disabling the onboard ethernet worked for me.

Albert