Wireless adapter problem?

pinksoir

How do,

My girlfriend recently bought a cheap enough laptop (Advent) and the wireless has started to become intermittent. It keeps disconnecting and then takes a while to reconnect. It's the latest Realtek driver. Also, it's not a distance thing as this happens when she's in the same room as the router.

The thing is, when I'm on my laptop in the same room I never have this problem, which leads me to believe it's not a router issue. But then again I have a computer in another room that disconnects from the wireless often enough, but it's a USB wireless dongle and I presumed that that was the reason.

Both our laptops are wireless N enabled, but the router in G (this shouldn't be a problem).

The laptop is only about a month old and the intermittency only began about a week ago.

What should I do?

bhickey

First thing to try would be to change the wireless channel that the router is using. The problem might be related to interference and some wireless devices can deal with interference better than others which is why one computer might be fine while another has problems. Start on Channel 1 and test it for a while.

pinksoir

I'll give that a go, cheers. It was set on "auto", so I've now changed it to 01 for the time being, til I see.

Are there any preferred channels, or is it much of a muchness?

bhickey

pinksoir wrote: »

Are there any preferred channels, or is it much of a muchness?

The best one is really the one that's farthest away from what everyone else is using. In theory, the lower frequencies might perform marginally better around obstacles so I lean towards Channel 1 generally if possible.

Download inSSIDer to see what wireless networks are near you.

pinksoir

Cheers. One of the neighbours is using channel 1, so I changed to channel 4.

inSSIDer caused my first bluescreen on this laptop though!

bhickey

pinksoir wrote: »

inSSIDer caused my first bluescreen on this laptop though!

Oops. I normally use Netstumbler myself on Windows but inSSIDer is probably easier to use and the interface looks nicer

pinksoir

Ah, it could have been because I installed the x86 instead of x64 version...

Anyways, it appears to have fixed the problem, so thanks for your help. I'll give it a while to see if it starts acting up again though.

quaidox

pinksoir wrote: »

Cheers. One of the neighbours is using channel 1, so I changed to channel 4.

inSSIDer caused my first bluescreen on this laptop though!

you should change to channel 6, channel 4 overlaps with channel 1 if you are using 802.11G