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[TFA_Viper]

Hi,

I have two aging laptops, running Windows XP SP3, an ACER Travelmate and a Sony Vaio, both of which have internal 802.11 B/G wireless NICs.

I have a D-Link DIR-655 802.11 N router, which is configured to run two wireless networks, a primary network and a secondary / guest network, both setup in N only mode.

To connect the laptops I purchased two D-Link DWA-645 RangeBooster N650 external PCMCIA 802.11 N wireless NICs.

I purchased the card for the ACER initially, disabled the old internal NIC, installed the new external NIC as per instructions, allowed the installed D-Link software (as opposed to Windows) to manage the connection, connected to the primary network, and have never had any problems with it since. It connects first time every time and provides a reliable connection.

I purchased the card for the Sony shortly after, followed the same process but have always had the following issue…

Issue 1: About 1 time in 4 the laptop boots up and establishes a connection exactly as expected, however, the other 3 out of 4 times it fails to connect. In either situation there are two connection status indicators in the system tray, the D-Link one and the normal windows one. For a good connection both show connected (using connection 2, which is correct for the external NIC, 1 being the disabled internal NIC) at 300 Mbit as you would expect for a 802.11 N connection, however, when the connection fails the windows indicator always says that connection 2 is “acquiring network address” at 54 Mbit, which is B/G speed? Not that this matters as the connection never succeeds and the only way to proceed is to shut down and try booting up again.

As the Sony only gets lite use, I have been living with this annoying glitch for a while, however, I have now come across a second issue.

Issue 2: I want to move the Sony laptop over to the secondary network, which is where I graveyard all my legacy devices that don’t get much use. I tried to do the following…
1) Boot up and establish a good connection.
2) Go into D-Link connection software via system tray icon, go into my networks tab, where the primary network is listed as the only network, deleted this association. This still left me connected but as I could not see a disconnect button in the software I reasoned that a reboot might achieve the same effect as the software then wouldn’t know to reconnect having removed the above connection.
3) Rebooted several times, the first few times I got the same symptoms descried in issues 1 above, so I couldn’t be sure if it was failing to connect because of that issue of because I had successfully removed the connection, so I kept rebooting. I eventually achieved a normal boot without the above issue and found myself to be reconnected to the primary network as if nothing had happened! Going back into the D-Link connection software I found the entry for the primary network had been restored.

So in summery my two issues are, 1) that I cannot establish a connection reliably when I do want one, and 2) I cannot disconnect reliably when I don’t!

In the short term I am happy to continue to live with issues 1 if I can resolve issues 2 and get the Sony successfully moved over to the secondary network, however, once it’s over there I want to be confident that it’s not going to keep hopping back onto the primary network whenever it feels like it as I probably won’t bother to continue to keep its security software up to date etc.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Rob.

[FurryNutz]

What security mode are you using? Preferred security is WPA-Personal. WPA2/AES only if your using N mode only. Might try setting from Auto to AES only and test.

Any cordless 2.4Ghz house phones?
Any other WiFi routers in the area? Use InSSIDer to find out.
Turn off Short GI and Extra Wireless Protection if you have it. Under Advanced/Advanced Wireless.
Turn off all anti virus and firewall programs on PC while testing. 3rd party firewalls are not generally needed when using routers as they are effective on blocking malicious inbound traffic.

[slpip]

Since you have a mixed G/N mode devices, your router should use the mix b/g/n mode.  Also at the Wireless Network Properties, make sure you select/unselect box for the network connection. (Right click at the wireless network icon at the right hand side of the task bar.)  So that your computer can log on to the selected wireless network.