What is causing my wireless problems?

Question

I have a Dell XPS M1330, since I moved to my new house, the wireless barely works on it, my housemates report no problems, so I guess it's something to do with my laptop. It's eratic in normal mode, sometimes not working for days, usually working on-and-off, forcing me to reload pages a few times before they work, etc. It works perfectly in safe mode, the driver I'm using is the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection, version 12.4.4.5, with a date at 26/10/2009, the most recent one I could find, bluetooth is not enabled, and I'm running Vista 32-bit Home Premium, which it shipped with.

I also tried disabling IPv6 and resetting the IP stack, both to no avail. Can anybody help me?

Edit: Forgot to say, I tried changing the wireless channel too, didn't work.

Edit 2: I stopped uTorrent from loading on start up and it's workingg now as a result. Still don't know what caused it, but at least it's working now.

Answer 1

I recently had this problem and have been on the phone with my cable company numerous times to solve the issue.

I finally found someone technically competent that could help me. He ruled out the service to my cable modem in the house was a problem by asking if the lights on the modem changed when the service went out. They did not change at all. This observation led him to ask where my wireless router was located. He mentioned:

If your wireless router is next to other appliances like:

• a computer
• a tv
• a stereo
• a cd player

Then, there may be wireless interference coming from those appliances causing your connection to drop for a period of time.

By moving the wireless router away from these appliances I have not seen the issue reoccur.

Answer 2

Separate your issues - house WAP/laptop. Test them apart from each other. If you go to an hot spot (Borders, Barnes, McD, wherever) does your laptop wireless work okay? Test for several days to make sure.

If so, go to where one of your housemates is surfing just fine and see if you are okay at that same specific location. If so, see if they can go to where you normally sit. Are they okay there?

You can also make sure that you you are on the same WAP and not connecting to some other WAP in the vicinity with a weaker signal. You can download and run some wardriving utils and check signal strengths inside your room versus elsewhere.

Answer 3

If you physically changed location, I would say channel is the most important thing to consider.

If you are using the default channel (6) on your router, you may want to consider changing it. 1 and 11 are usually the best alternatives.

The reason for this change is interference. Other devices and networks can clog a specific channel. I recently had the same problem and switching to a less crowded channel solved my problem.

You can easily switch channels by logging in to your router from a web interface (type in 192.168.1.1 in a browser).