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Problem

I can not connect to my Techniclan WAR-54G router's personal wireless network via my older Acer Travelmate 2300 XP Pro laptop that uses a InProComm IPN2220 wireless network card. However, this laptop does see all my neighbor's networks just fine. This leads me to believe that the configuration in one of the two devices, router or wireless card, is not properly set. I just do not know which one.

I must also mention that my other Vista laptop can connect just fine to my router's personal network. (This is the computer I am writing this post from)

I thought that the best and most thorough way to document my problem was to just show a list of screenshots of the relevant interface windows for the router, wireless card configuration, wireless network connection properties and configuration utility.

For those who can not see the images below please go to these image galleries:

Router Screenshots
http://picasaweb.google.com/adam.siddhi/ImagesRouter#

Wireless Network Connection Properties
http://picasaweb.google.com/adam.siddhi/ImagesWireless#

Router Settings via my Vista computer

Wireless

Wireless Security Wireless Access Control Wireless Site Survey

LAN

LAN Interface Setup

Firewall Port Filtering IP Filtering MAC Filtering

Wireless Network Connection Interfaces from my Acer Travelmate 2300

Wireless Network Connection Properties

My manually input preferred network

Association Tab

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  • That't a lot of screenshots...
    – JNK
    Sep 13, 2010 at 13:55
  • I can't see any of the images because of filtering, but is the network secured ? How is it secured ? WPA2 ? Does the laptop network card support WPA2 ?
    – Sathyajith Bhat ♦
    Sep 13, 2010 at 13:58
  • @JNK just trying to be as thorough as possible to solve this very stressful problem. @Sathya Like in my comment to your answer below I see that my network card does not support WPA2 but my router does have the ability to encrypt in WPA2 mixed which leads me to believe it could work since the newer Vista laptop NIC can take WPA2 and the older Acer XP laptop NIC 'only' accepts WPA. What do you think? I found this link supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-4349 but I am not sure if WPA2 mixed would defiantly work and I don't want to risk a security break.
    – classer
    Sep 13, 2010 at 18:13
  • Try out mixed mode. If it works, then select that. Else fall back to WPA.
    – Sathyajith Bhat ♦
    Sep 13, 2010 at 20:17

2 Answers 2

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I can't see any of the images because of filtering, but is the network secured ? How is it secured ? WPA2 ? Does the laptop network card support WPA2 ? I had a similar problem on my old Dell Inspiron, I had to bump the network security method down from WPA2 to WPA and then the network was being detected.

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2
  • I have added 2 links to the router and wireless card properties galleries to the top of the post. here they are again. router: picasaweb.google.com/adam.siddhi/ImagesRouter# wireless card: picasaweb.google.com/adam.siddhi/ImagesWireless# . One thing that I do notice when looking through the screen shots is that my router's wireless settings show that it's encrypting with WPA2-PSK with AES. I have the option to change it to WPA and WPA2 mixed. I also noticed that I do not have to option to use WPA2 at all on my older Acer laptop. But could WPA2 mixed work?
    – classer
    Sep 13, 2010 at 18:05
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    @Adam If by "mixed" you mean WPA+WPA2 as my router has ( i.imgur.com/hSDQ3.png ) then you can select that.
    – Sathyajith Bhat ♦
    Sep 13, 2010 at 18:11
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Success! What I did first was to first take Sathya's advise to change my router's encryption mode to WPA2 Mixed Mode which would allow WPA2-PSK AES & WPA-PSK TKIP encryption methods. I needed this because the InProComm Wireless Card only accepts WPA-PSK. When I changed this setting it did not work though and went through all the other variables.

I realized that my router was broadcasting on channel 13 but my Vista laptop's Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 5100 wireless card's Ad Hoc Channel 802.11 b/g is 11. So I decided to go back to my Acer's InProComm IPN2220 Wireless LAN card's configuration window and change the Channel to Start Ad Hoc/AP from 13 to 11 and then I went back to my router's settings and changed it's channel from 13 to 11 and PRESTO!

It worked. My Acer Travelmate 2300's InProComm IPN2220 Wireless LAN card can now connect to my router. Problem solved!

I want to thank everyone who commented and attempted to answer my questions related to this problem. Yes I asked multiple questions in an attempt to solve this problem starting back in February 2010.

How do I connect my Windows XP laptop to the internet? Feb 2010
How do I connect my Windows XP laptop to the internet?

How can I connect my XP laptop to my wireless network if my wireless network doesn't show up in the list? Sept 9th 2010
How can I connect my XP laptop to my wireless network if my wireless network doesn't show up in the list?

So with the combination of Sathya's answer and openfkg's answer from the Sept 9th 2010 post I solved my problem.

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