carl0s

A small techie computer supplier. Will cost peanuts. Dixons/PC World will be £20 - £40, technie place will be ~£7 - £10. Or mail order from Scan if you don't mind waiting - £4-ish. http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Products.ASP?CatID=5&FilterCategories=61&Thumbnails=yes

They're only a day late then? Might be using Royal Mail or someone equally useless.

Up to 100mtrs. Any longer and you need to use a repeater (hub/switch) in between.

Replied back..

Sent you a PM the other day.

Mine too.

Never heard of them. What's the special thing about them? Are they just Internet-only bank accounts, or are they some kind of tax-free incentive thing like ISAs ?

Groovy. Fingers crossed.

So it looks like it's fixed in firmware, therefore you're OK on that front.

I don't think the Netgear DG routers have the option to change the DHCP lease time, but anyway it would be under LAN or LAN IP setup.

USB because they sell more of them and you'll get better support.

I was gonna say, encryption used to cause all sorts of problems. You might find it works reliably with WEP or completely open, but that's not a nice solution really. Early wireless interopability seemed to be a nightmare when WEP was entered into the equation, but nowadays it's rarely an issue and WPA usually just works.

Yep, sounds like a plan. Your USB1.1 shouldn't be an issue really. The port supports 12mbps, and your probably not going to be downloading from t'internet at even 8mbps.

Highly unlikely that you have a cardbus problem, but quite probable that your choice of wireless cards is severely limited if you are looking at pc card stuff because there is no market for pc card wifi any more. The Netgear wg111T USB sticks seem to work well enough. They're RaLink based if I remember right, so drivers can be had directly from ralinktech.com.tw

It's starting to sound that way. The aerials are screwed-in on the router properly aren't they?

Good idea. If you can buy the Netgear 108mbps stuff, that's usually better. It's based on Atheros chips which I have always found to work extremely well, although they don't offer drivers directly to the end user either

Looks like he was a bit unsure between white, and red

I have zero experience with them, except that I've seen their Fast Ethernet chip on some very cheap motherboards. Anyhoo, I have heard of them, but they aren't offering any drivers on their website for you (http://www.marvell.com )

Go into Device Manager and bring up the properties on that Netgear card, then go to the drivers tab and click "Driver Details". What does it say? Ralink, Atheros, Broadcom etc.? Oh, also you could try turning off any non-standard features in there. XPress, Afterburner, x2, superhot, superfast etc.

I'm afraid that chap has an Intel wireless card in his laptop, so he's been instructed to go get the newest drivers for his wireless card. I'd be very surprised if your Netgear card used an Intel Pro/Wirelss chip, although I guess it could be possible. It's either not going to work or you're going to be seeing the placebo effect. If you tell us what model your Netgear wireless card is, we might be able to tell you where to get newer drivers than Netgear's own.

Your netgear wireless card is intel-based?

Does your 'very good' signal show as not many bars on the strength indicator? Some buildings are just not wifi friendly at all, and you need to find alternate solutions. I have overcome these problems with HomePlug gear in a few cases. You can either use two HomePlug ethernet bridges and run cable into your workstation or use a switch with one if you have a few computers within cabling distance, or you can use one homeplug bridge on the router side and a homeplug wireless ap in the blackspot. Could just be an iffy Router/Access Point though if the signal is good and strong one minute then not the next. You don't have other 2.4GHz running close by like cordless phones, microwaves, bluetooth transceivers do you?

There's all sorts that can cause problems, but channel numbers is a good place to start. The 3com OfficeConnect 108mbps (Atheros) unit I have here was absolutely useless out of the box until I disabled WME (wireless multimedia extensions).

I go for 1 because it's far away from 11, and it's usually 11 that's being a problem since that tends to be set as default. The frequencies go up channel by channel so channel 1 is the lower freq and 11 (or 13 eu/14 whereever else) are the highest. They are generally talked about though because they do not overlap each other in terms of frequency band. Each channel doesn't use just its own different frequency, they use a bit below and a bit above, and this bit below and bit above crosses over (overlaps) with the next two or so channels above and below, so if you were wanting two networks which would not interfere at all in the same place, you would use channels 1 & 6, or 6 & 11, or 1 & 11. If you wanted three WLANs in the same environment that didn't interfere, you'd use 1, 6 & 11.

You probably need to try a different channel. What I tend to do is fire off an ongoing ping from the computer to the router, and watch for dropped packets and long return times. From a cmd prompt in Windows, do: ping -t [ip address of router] and leave that going. You shouldn't see any pauses (which are dropped packets or delays), it should be a constant "reply from" every second, with responses times of no more than a few milliseconds (I am seeing 1ms here). If there are delays, dropped packets or hundreds of milliseconds, then you should try changing the channel from the router. You can leave the ping running. When you change the channel on the router, the connection will be dropped momentarily, but it will reconnect and the ping will carry on. Most routers use channel 11 as default. If there is a problem on 11 I tend to try 1, then 6, then any others after that if still no improvement.