Wireless network

whew boy.
if you have experienced troublefree internet at this location in the past. and if this is a new installation, this is what i think:
it is interference or dampening of a marginal signal imho. do you have cell phone nearby. do you have satellite tv/radio antenna nearby. are you in the immediate vicinity of somebody else with wireless. like police, fire, city, radio stations, hip neighbors etc etc etc
depending on the quality of your equipment you will need pretty good line of sight for your wireless equipment. are you attempting access thru walls? floors? closed doors? tiny bits of window?

Hello...

This sounds like sporadic interference from other devices. You are likely running 802.11b or 802.11g. Both of these use 2.4 GHz and can have interference from many other devices including microwave ovens, cordless telephones, and other wireless networks.

Things to try:

- Test to see if the problem occurs whenever a nearby microwave oven is in use. This gets complicated in an apartment building situation.

- Review how strong/weak your radio signal (location varies depending on software).

- Change the channel used by the wireless access point (WAP). This could work around interference from other wireless networks.

- Reposition the WAP and/or its antenna. It's generally better for the antenna to be vertical and be physically high in the room.

- If your WAP accepts it, install a higher gain antenna (an antenna that works better with weak signals).

- If the antenna on your PC is low-gain or physically low, try installing a higher gain external antenna that is physically high.

Does this help?

-----Steve Jackson

CEO/CSA
Software Corporation (Softcorp)
http://www.softcorp.us/probono
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P.S. Be sure to rate the answers you get on TR and close your question when you're done. Thanks.

Could be losing connection, in which case you already have two good answers.

Another possibility is that you are losing DHCP from router. Check router configuration and ensure that DHCP lease period is set to at least 24 hrs.

I have a Linksys wireless router that sometimes decides it wants to stop providing DHCP. If DHCP lease period was short, connection to internet would be lost. If that's the case, can still see wireless access point and connect to it, but not to internet or any other service requiring an IP address.

Dalton

Check to make sure that power management on your wireless NIC is disabled - in device manager, go to properties of the device and uncheck the box about power saving if it's checked.

It could still be the interference as everyone else is saying though, this is just one thing to check - might cut down on the disconnects.

I had a similar problem once before. My wireless adapter didnt 'wake up' very well.