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Problem connecting to wireless at home
I used to be able to connect to my home wireless with no problems. I recently reformatted my laptop and of course I had to download drivers and such. However, now I'm having problems getting a connection wirelessly. I am connected with excellent signal strength but the status says "limited or no connectivity". I don't think anything is wrong with the modem because I am able to establish a wired connection. Thanks for any attempts to help.
Expert's answerThere are several things to look at. The first is to get a copy of inSSIDer from the folks at MetaGeek.net. I used to suggest Netstumbler but it doesn't have support for WPA. If you can see your access point (AP) with inSSIDer, that would indicate that the AP is OK and the area you need to concentrate is your laptop. You don't mention the version of Windows that you are running on. If it is XP, you really want to install XP SP 3, because it fixes several wireless-related problems. If you are on Vista, make sure you have the latest patches installed. Make sure that you have the latest firmware installed on your AP. You may need to taking things down a step or two on your AP depending on how hard you have it locked down. If you have broadcasting turned off for your SSID, try enabling it just to make it easier for the laptop to find the AP. If inSSIDer shows the SSID for your AP, try using the wireless survey functionality that is included with most to see if it also sees the AP as well. I like using different apps that do the same test just to make sure you get the same results. If you have encryption turned on at the AP (and you should), temporarily turn off encryption to see if it is a setting problem between AP and your laptop. Depending on the type and level of encryption used, you might have a setting problem between the two devices that could explain the problem. For example WPA and WPA2 are similar encryption methods but you can't use WPA to talk to WPA2. Depending on who made the wireless card in your laptop (it is probably Intel), go directly to the wireless-car vendor's Web site and get the latest drivers (it's possible that the latest drivers are not on the laptop vendor's website). Look for things in the immediate area of your laptop and access point that may have changed. If you have a cordless phone, see if it is in the same frequency range as your AP. If the phone is labeled with something like 2.4 somewhere on the phone, try removing power from the phone and see if your wireless problem goes away. If that fixes it, you will need to change out your wireless phone to one that uses either 900-Mhz or the 5-Gigahertz range. |
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