Strange wireless issue

box · 3 Mar 2008 at 21:38

I've got two desktop PCs using wireless in my house. One has a USB wireless adapter, the other a PCI wireless card. Both manufactured by Belkin. Both seem to experience a similar issue in one shape or form. The fact is, every so often, the connection will simply disconnect and reconnect. The connection simply drops and then connects again. Both PCs are showing as having 70%+ signal.

This is obviously very annoying when surfing the net as it will cause a few seconds of downtime, meaning pages often time out. The PC with the PCI card is definately worse, with disconnections every few minutes. The other system seems to experience them exactly once an hour. This I have deduced from the event log.

Looking at the event log from the PCI card machine, the following shows up...

There are a lot of very suspect TCPIP events there. Each of which contains the following information...

Can anyone tell me anything about this? Clicking the microsoft support link simply tells me these are routine events and nothing to worry about. But obviously something is going on!

I myself have hardwired my PC into the router (WRT54GL), and have had no problems. So it appears to just be the wireless. As things are going, I am really considering just wiring the whole house with Cat5e and doing away with this wireless nonsense!

Can anyone help?

Chief Wiggum · 4 Mar 2008 at 07:48

if you do a wiressless scan, are there any other wireless AP's that you can see nearby - if so it may be worth changing the channel on the Router to either 1, 6 or 12 so that they are not clashing (particularly if it's a strong signal from a neighbour)

You may find that it's dropping due to that....

box · 4 Mar 2008 at 19:15

My network is currently using channel 13. There are about 6 foreign access points in range, varying throughout the day. However, none of them is on a channel above 10, and none have a signal strength greater than 2 bars.

bluestreak101 · 5 Mar 2008 at 14:02

I had a similar problem with a Belkin PCI card, and tried everything I could think of down to changing the antennae etc.

Something you could try is to update the firmware on the Router, this might help.

I also had a problem with a Belkin ADSL Router which would constantly reboot it self when ever it wanted to.

Belkin seem to be a very poor manufacturer of wireless products.

I would do away with the Belkins and get some made by Linksys or Netgear (im sure there are a few more manufacturers out there that make better cards but these two specialise in networking alone)

K.C. Leblanc · 5 Mar 2008 at 14:09

Might be worth increasing the length of the DHCP lease on the router.

sansnom · 5 Mar 2008 at 14:42

I was having similar problems when I first got my netgear 3 years back and I did this, I don't remember where I got the tip from I think it BlackSpider that guy who used to tweak XP a lot.

go into services.msc and disable wireless zero configurator (all the way at the bottom), make the service is also stopped if it is currently running. Reboot and see if it's better now.

worked for me.