I have a desktop connected to the LAN via a PCI wifi card that links to an Access point about 10m away. All woked fine for months until a few days ago when I fired up the machine only to find that it refused to connect.
Ipconfig showed that there was no connection & ping simply produced a general error. The wierd thig is that windows was still showing all the wireless networks in range- with good/strong signals. Device manager checked out fine & windows diagnostics (windows7) came up blank-no suprise there
I assumed the TCP/IP stack was corrupt, so uninstalled & reinstalled the card- no change.
Replacing the card with a brand new one made no difference, so in desparation I reinstalled the OS assuming that replacing both the hardware and the software couldn’t fail to solve the problem. It connected for a few seconds- then went back to exactly the same state as before.
I can only assume that something is interfearing with the wifi link, but if the signal is so weak that the NIC can’t even raise a Ping, how is it managing to pick up half a dozen wireless networks anything up to 50M away?
Incidentally, the AP the the machine connects to is the ‘tail end’ of a point to pont bridge, the other end of which is connected directly to the router. All other clients (wireless & wired) connect fine. There’s no firewall other that the router & the one built in to Windows7
Any Ideas?