Wireless Network disappears - WTF ?

alanajane

Hi Folks,

A weird one for the Guru's. Well its weird to me anyway,never had this problem before.

A friend of mine had a laptop lying around and asked me to clean it up and update it so his better half could use it around the house. He has eircom broadband and a Zyexl modem with wireless.
I done the job on the laptop and installed a belkin usb wirless adaptor. I connected to my wireless setup and downloaded all the updates (xp) and job done. Brought the laptop back to him powered it up and i get the notification of wireless networks found - lovely jubley.
Click into networks and there are about 4 networks available, his is at the top, the others are his neighbours. Then they all disappear. I hit refresh and they dont come back but a really weak one that wasnt there first does. Refresh again and nothing, no networks at all.

I had my own xp laptop with me and I powered it up just to see. The very same thing, there one minute gone the next ?.

Any ideas ........

PogMoThoin

alanajane wrote: »

Hi Folks,

A weird one for the Guru's. Well its weird to me anyway,never had this problem before.

A friend of mine had a laptop lying around and asked me to clean it up and update it so his better half could use it around the house. He has eircom broadband and a Zyexl modem with wireless.
I done the job on the laptop and installed a belkin usb wirless adaptor. I connected to my wireless setup and downloaded all the updates (xp) and job done. Brought the laptop back to him powered it up and i get the notification of wireless networks found - lovely jubley.
Click into networks and there are about 4 networks available, his is at the top, the others are his neighbours. Then they all disappear. I hit refresh and they dont come back but a really weak one that wasnt there first does. Refresh again and nothing, no networks at all.

I had my own xp laptop with me and I powered it up just to see. The very same thing, there one minute gone the next ?.

Any ideas ........

Theres your problem
Belkin make some terrible shíte that give nothing but trouble

Does the laptop not have a built in wireless card?

alanajane

I know what you mean Pog.
No the laptop does not have built in wireless. Thing is it did have an old PCMCIA wireless adaptor with gprs. I reinstalled this and I got the same issue.

Also note that I said I attempted to connect my own dell laptop (with built in wifi) and exactly the same issue.

Anyone think its the router ??

PogMoThoin

Try changing channel on the router to a channel completely away from the one its on, if the channel is left on auto set it to either 1, 6 or 11, these are the common non-overlapping channels.

To do this, connect with an ethernet cable, the ip to connect to the zyxel may be 192.168.1.1 but if not it will definitely be listed as the gateway when you "ipconfig /all" in command prompt.
username should be admin, password 1234.

alanajane

Thanks Pog I will try that. I did have a look around the settings the other night (using ethernet) but Im not that familiar with it so i left it alone.

Here's hoping.

dub45

Would there be any other wireless devices which might be interfering? Video senders can be disastrous for wifi.

alanajane

Havent had a chance to get out to him yet, so no progress.

THe laptop was right beside the router and its all in a front room with no other wirless equipment. They dont have video senders.