Hi,
a client of mine has a laptop which I looked at and couldn’t figure out. I will probably get the laptop next week to check out again.
It’s a Dell laptop with built-in wireless A/B/G card. At home she can connect just fine to her Qwest Actiontec router, but wherever else she goes her connection won’t work. It starts out well at 54Mbps but immediately drops and then stays or fluctuates around 1Mbps, and there is no real connection, i.e. no web activity works properly. Occasionally (randomly) you can get to one or two sites. We met in a coffee shop to test her wifi where it doesn’t work.
She is using MSN Explorer as her main browser, but I also tested IE.
I checked her IP setup which is normal (DHCP). IPCONFIG seems to receive a normal address. I checked the wifi card setup which is normal – I tried a few changes without success.
My own laptop connected fine to the local wireless network and was stable the whole time.
She also said she cannot connect in hotels using the wired LAN connection. I have not been able to make any tests there.
I suspected bad hardware and plugged in a Linksys PCMCIA card, installed the drivers and then got an error 10 Device could not start.
The laptop also complains about a new printer it finds (which was only connected once, but was never installed), and it asks for the drivers for new found hardware on each Windows start.
Sounds to me like Windows is about to die, unless it’s a virus which I didn’t find using HiJackThis.
Any ideas beyond what I already tried?
Thanks!