Constant Wireless Disconnects

[Turaylon Soulshadow]

Reformatted my computer again, reinstalled everything exactly as I did last time. Whenever I try to watch a movie/episode of House off of a website, watch YouTube, load a game/AIM, and sometimes just randomly sitting here it will disconnect from the internet and reconnect itself. WZC has been turned off and did nothing. It's definitely a problem coming from my computer because my sister's laptop works fine, as does the other desktop that is on the same router.

Wireless card- Realtek RTL8187 Wireless 802.11b/g

[Ddrak]

I hate wireless...

[Turaylon Soulshadow]

I hate it, too, but where my bedroom is I can't put it on an actual ethernet cable even with drilling holes in the floors and walls because the router is on the other side of the house, although I get a perfect signal from where I am.

[Ddrak]

HomePlug ftw.

I am seriously never using WiFi again for anything that I'll be using long-term.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

I am seriously never using WiFi again for anything that I'll be using long-term.

And you'll make all your guest's netbooks, iPods, smartphones, etc. plug into that? You're effectively tethered, the same as you are with ethernet, and you're not taking advantage of the full capabilities of all your devices. Simon says take one giant leap backwards.

Our entire house is exclusively wireless, even my main work computer. I can basically move my office anywhere in the house with a moment's notice. I don't do it a lot, but occasionally there's a compelling reason like construction going on outside my window and I want to work on the other side of the house. And we take full advantage of the mobility with our other devices too, and of course all the visiting devices. I'm running open wireless (yeah I know, it's a lifestyle choice) so you walk into my house, open your laptop and you're surfing the interwebs.

I will be honest and say it was quite a bit of pain to get where we are now, but it was probably much more pain then Tura will need to go through with all this square footage we have (3 floors, > 4k sq. ft. with one router - was dead set against running more than one) and all these devices that had to work (we really wanted to keep everything "G") and keep constant connections.

There's a whole bunch of tricks you can use, and I would say the first place to start is with other non-wifi devices which share the same spectrum like microwaves and cordless phones causing interference. Don't put the router or the receiver anywhere near a microwave, or if you have to you can just move the microwave. Same goes for your telephone base station. Swap out your 2.4 GHz phones for the newer 5.8 GHz (?) models (get the digital dec) if at all possible.

Second, you'll want to move the router and receivers around to get a feel for the best locations for both. Especially important is the location of the router and its antennae. This could take quite a bit of time as it's not usually obvious of the dynamics of the location. Instead of going too much into the physics of it, suffice it to say that radio waves bounce off shit. Moving the router a foot to the left or bumping one of the antennas as much as a millimeter could give your entire location drastically different reception.

Thirdly, you can go with wireless-N, which has greater range (and bandwidth). I didn't want to do that becuase when I did mine, everything was "pre-standards based" and I didn't want to have to redo it all. But now the standard is finally finished.

It works great for us now. I'm using a 10 year old Linksys router deep in the basement that was resurrected with the DD-RT open firmware, running "G" and all our devices get reception anywhere on the property. But again, it took probably a week's worth of experimentation, and before that much head-scratching equating the dropped connections to the phone ringing and re-heating our coffee lol.

[Turaylon Soulshadow]

I get a great signal from where I am. Before I reformatted I never had any issues with it, but every time I have to wipe my computer and redo my wireless stuff on here I end up with this same problem where it randomly disconnects. We haven't gotten anything new in the way of wireless devices. Disabling Wireless Zero fixed it for a night, then it started acting up again.

[Ddrak]

Try looking for different drivers. If Windows ships with drivers, try them rather than the manufacturer's. Or try the other way around. etc.


@Freecare:

I think you missed the point of my statement. I still have WiFi for the whole iPod etc. thing and being tethered to a power point for long-term use is a fact regardless of whether you're using it for your network as well as power or not. Naturally with a laptop you can easily use *both* wired and wireless as you see fit - taking the stability of wired when you're not wandering around and suffering the whims of neighboring apartments blasting 2.4GHz interference when you are roaming. If anything, I'd suggest that by using wired and wireless as appropriate I'm using more of the full capabilities than you are.

I'll use WiFi if I have line-of-sight. Just too much pain in several different houses to bother with anything else for me.

Why did you only go with one router? Setting up 3 would seem like an obvious choice to me? Again, I use homeplug and push the routers wherever I want without worrying about the wiring getting in the way.

DECT phones use 1.9GHz (just FYI), but are awesome. I could never go back to an analog phone.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

@DD: Yeah, my bad on the digital DECT 6.0. I mixed it up with my last phone which was a 5.8 GHz analog phone which had a shitty call quality. We use the digital DECT now for our home phone and my office phone and we love it. Also, the range is ridiculous.

And for your plug-in toy, /shrug whatever floats your boat I guess. Maybe I'm just not seeing the compelling need versus something like ethernet. I might start augmenting my house with wired gigabit ethernet because all those HD movies are a dog moving over the wifi, and my storage is scattered all over the house and I'd rather put all those bad-boy hard drives in the server room.

And I wanted to keep one router because I'm in the theoretical range of a single router. Also it's less points of configuration / failure / power / heat. Over the last couple years I've cut the number of devices in my office down to a fraction. And when I played around with multiple routers / APs, it was a supreme hassle getting them to play nice together maybe because they were different brands (box of random routers FTL). I didn't want to buy more hardware, though that's always an option. Either way now in the entire house there's only one little trouble spot in our informal dining room which still bugs the wife because she sometimes drinks her coffee there. This spot has a couple issues like being right next to the microwave.

@Tura: WTF? You're reformatting your computer more than once to try to fix it, or are you wiping your computer for different reasons? Clearly that's not working. You want to identify where the fault is and best way to do that is to start factoring things out. You want to either try a different router or a different computer, or maybe a different wifi dongle for the same computer. No sense tracking down the fault in your computer (radio, drivers, windows, etc.) if you have a flaky router.

Also, an interference issue could still be causing your problem. Great signal then someone makes a hot pocket and bam, no connection. It would seem totally random.

[Turaylon Soulshadow]

@DD: Yeah, my bad on the digital DECT 6.0. I mixed it up with my last phone which was a 5.8 GHz analog phone which had a shitty call quality. We use the digital DECT now for our home phone and my office phone and we love it. Also, the range is ridiculous.

And for your plug-in toy, /shrug whatever floats your boat I guess. Maybe I'm just not seeing the compelling need versus something like ethernet. I might start augmenting my house with wired gigabit ethernet because all those HD movies are a dog moving over the wifi, and my storage is scattered all over the house and I'd rather put all those bad-boy hard drives in the server room.

And I wanted to keep one router because I'm in the theoretical range of a single router. Also it's less points of configuration / failure / power / heat. Over the last couple years I've cut the number of devices in my office down to a fraction. And when I played around with multiple routers / APs, it was a supreme hassle getting them to play nice together maybe because they were different brands (box of random routers FTL). I didn't want to buy more hardware, though that's always an option. Either way now in the entire house there's only one little trouble spot in our informal dining room which still bugs the wife because she sometimes drinks her coffee there. This spot has a couple issues like being right next to the microwave.

@Tura: WTF? You're reformatting your computer more than once to try to fix it, or are you wiping your computer for different reasons? Clearly that's not working. You want to identify where the fault is and best way to do that is to start factoring things out. You want to either try a different router or a different computer, or maybe a different wifi dongle for the same computer. No sense tracking down the fault in your computer (radio, drivers, windows, etc.) if you have a flaky router.

Also, an interference issue could still be causing your problem. Great signal then someone makes a hot pocket and bam, no connection. It would seem totally random.

I wiped it once for different reasons recently and haven't done it again. The microwave has never been an issue before for as long as I've had the computer, neither of which has moved from where they are, well unless someone's drunk and slides the microwave cart across the room.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Ok, here's what I would do.

1. First make sure it's not a conflict with a cordless phone.

2. Try the drivers as DD suggested.

3. Try moving your desktop around a couple times. It's possible to have a "weird spot" where you get a good signal but yet still lose connections.

4. Say fuck it and just buy a new $15 USB WiFi dongle or one of those PCI cards with the antenna that comes out the back. They both seem to work about the same for me.

Once I had this exact same problem with my HP laptop. Drove me nuts, and the latest drivers did nothing. Turned out there was a bug in the HP official drivers and after many hours of research had to download some generic driver from Realtek to fix the problem, but that's probably not worth the effort if you can just unplug the one that's giving you grief.

[Ddrak]

And for your plug-in toy, /shrug whatever floats your boat I guess. Maybe I'm just not seeing the compelling need versus something like ethernet. I might start augmenting my house with wired gigabit ethernet because all those HD movies are a dog moving over the wifi, and my storage is scattered all over the house and I'd rather put all those bad-boy hard drives in the server room.

Well, yeah. If you've got the option of dropping cat6 through your walls then my toy is pointless. I've used it when renting and didn't have that option.

Dd

[Embar Angylwrath]

Just an FYI.. there are some very reasonable prices out there for moving CAT-5 (or any other wiring) from room to room. Its amazing what these guys cando now. Just a couple pencil holes in the ceilings/walls and they can drag stuff anywhere. I had it done myself. Had six lines dragged from near my entertainment center, up near a chimney flue, and three of them went over a support beam. Cost... $250. Oh, and they put in the ceiling speakers too.

The guy said they'd drag lines to any room/wall for $150/room. Your mileage may vary.

Anyway.. you don't have to settle for the cable guy drilling through walls and running lines along your carpet line. Hate those fuckers...

[Freecare Spiritwise]

You can buy the cordless drill, ladder, fish tape, crimping tool, cable, cable ends, etc. for around $250, do it yourself and have all the cool stuff left over. I just like having all the tools, and as long as they pay for themselves after 1 or 2 uses then my wife is happy. I still do some of my own automotive work (was actually an ASE certified mechanic years ago before I realized my back hurt every day) like brakes, oil changes, plugs, etc. My new favorite gadget is an automotive code scanner. You plug this thing in to any vehicle made after 1996 and it tells you why your check engine light is on. It's worth it even just to keep your mechanic honest.

So yeah, installing cabling can be a fun project. One of my friends is cabling his new house and hell, even Ari could do it. I'm probably going to just run 2 lines to ease the bottleneck on my network for large media files (some HD movies take up 15GB a piece depending on the compression) and upgrade to wireless N and stay mostly wireless. I get my wife to do the cable ends now because I'm getting old and my eyesight sucks.

I'm not sure what landlords let you do on rentals but I would think as long as it's professional you'd be ok. And if anyone asks, that cable-sized hole in the wall is where I hung my Monet. But the last time I rented, the fastest internet you could get residentially was ISDN. So again I'm out of the loop but there's got to be reasonable landlords out there, and it's really not that invasive to wire up a house if you do it right.

[Taxious]

Just an FYI.. there are some very reasonable prices out there for moving CAT-5 (or any other wiring) from room to room. Its amazing what these guys cando now. Just a couple pencil holes in the ceilings/walls and they can drag stuff anywhere. I had it done myself. Had six lines dragged from near my entertainment center, up near a chimney flue, and three of them went over a support beam. Cost... $250. Oh, and they put in the ceiling speakers too.

Who did you contact to get that done? I'd love some CAT5 in my apartment.