Wireless Connection Excellent but working intermitently

[chameleon]

Hello everyone, have a new wireless problem here I cant seem to tackle.

Its a Dell Dimension D800 running WinXP SP2.

Problem is the wireless connection always shows I am connected and shows an excellent signal and an IP address but it only allows me to browse websites and AIM intermitently. There are 3 other laptops in the household that do not experience this problem ever. (It's definitely not spyware as this computer is fairly new and has been cleaned of anything it had on it using HiJack This, Spybot S&D, etc)

Ive just never seen where the says you are connected to the wireless network AND you get an IP address but are only able to browse the web and do other internet related activities sometimes. Could there be something interfering with only THIS unit specifically?

Any suggestions? Your help is greatly appreciated.

[DMR]

It's definitely not spyware as this computer is fairly new and has been cleaned of anything it had on it using HiJack This, Spybot S&D, etc

Don't rule out the possibility of malicious infections; I've seen perfectly clean systems get infected after less than 30 minutes of being online.

When you loose the ability to browse:

- See if you can reach sites by their actual IP addresses instead of their URL. For example, if you find that you can't reach http://www.google.com, put the following in your browser's location/address box instead and see if the Google home page comes up:

http://66.102.7.147

- If you can't reach a site through your browser, see if you can at least "ping" the site. Again using Google as an example:

- Under your Start menu, go to Programs->Accessories->Command Prompt.

- In the DOS window that opens, type the following command at the prompt and then hit Enter:

ping www.google.com

- If that works, you should get 4 positive replys followed by some summary info. If it doesn't work, try to ping by IP address:

ping 66.102.7.147

[chameleon]

Definitely can't browse, use AIM or anything when the connection isn't working. The system as far as I can tell is perfectly clean. Any other ideas??

[DMR]

Definitely can't browse, use AIM or anything when the connection isn't working. The system as far as I can tell is perfectly clean. Any other ideas??

So you can't even ping a website, right?

A few suggestions and questions to try to isolate the source of the problem:

1. Are you going through a wireless Access Point connected to a wired router, or are you just using a wireless router? Please post the exact makes/models of your wireless devices.

2. When the Internet access dies, can you at least ping the IP of the router and/or Access Point, or the IPs of any of the other computers on the internal network?

3. Check your system log files to see if Windows is recording any error messages related to the connection drops in those logs:

Open the Event Viewer utility in your Administrative Tools control panel.

In the Event Viewer, look through the System and Application logs for entries flagged as "Warning" or "Error"; double-clicking on any of those entries will open a "details" window with more information about the error/warning. If you find any entries that seem to relate to network errors, post the full and exact contents given in the detail windows.

4. To determine if the problem lies specifically with your wireless connection or with your network software in general, connect the laptop to the router via an Ethernet cable and see if you still experience the problem.

[kc0arf]

Hi,

I am wondering if you carry a cell phone with you or a wireless phone, or perhaps always use some electronic gadget where you are at. It is possible your connection is being affected by outside sources. I have been in a place where the connection was great, the IP address was working fine, but a guys cell phone knocked the connection apart. The D-LINK software said we were connected, and all was working, yet we could not get anywhere due to the interference.

Christian

[DMR]

Hi,

I am wondering if you carry a cell phone with you or a wireless phone, or perhaps always use some electronic gadget where you are at.

That's always a possiblity. One of the problems with wireless computing is that a heck of a lot of other wireless devices use the 2.4GHz transmission band, and their interference can play holy hell with your connection.

I was visiting a client a few months ago and he was telling me about all of these weird, random connection problems he'd been having lately. It turns out that in the process of rearranging his office a few weeks prior, he'd stuck his wireless router on a shelf directly above his cordless phone's base station. Bingo, we had a winner! Move router away from phone, problem solved. :mrgreen:

[tidragoner]

I have the same issue. It happened on one of my laptop a couple days ago. It lost the conneciton intermittently although the network connection was shown ok. It basically lose any connection to the network. I can't ping anything except local host. using repair network function can fix the problem but it would reoccure again after 20 or 30 minutes. That laptop is a pretty new one so i can't find any adware and the winSock didn't fix the problem. i also tried assigning the machine with static IP but it didn't work either. I have another laptop which was working fine at that time. I basically can't figure out the cause of the problem and had to rebuild the system which does fix the problem. But now my second laptop experiences the same problem :sad: I really don't want to rebuild this one as I have too much stuff on it. the first laptop is winxphome sp2 and the second one is winxppro sp2. I'm on Comcast cable internet and using D-link DI-614.
Chameleon, have you be able to fixed your machine? I would also appreciate any other suggestion.
Thanks

[chameleon]

Wish I could say that I have, the machine I was actually trying to fix was for a client and I havent heard from him since I first posted. So the only thing that you found that fixed the problem was a complete uninstall and reinstall of windows?