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since yesterday I have a strange wifi problem with my pc. I have a wireless linksys router setup that worked fine for many months, now since yesterday my pc won't connect to the wifi signal anymore.

The strange thing is, my macbook pro still connects fine. SSID is broadcasting, but my windows XP doens't see it, I have all signal modes set to "auto".

Windows XP sees all my neighbours wifi networks, so the wifi card isn't broken or anything.

Any idea what can be wrong here?

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I believe this would be better answered on Superuser.com :) – Inisheer Jun 1 '10 at 7:13
sorry, can I move it myself? – Jorre Jun 1 '10 at 7:17
@Jorre: It will be automatically migrated when closed by the community (1 more vote). – Inisheer Jun 1 '10 at 7:24
I helped a friend who had a basically identical problem earlier today except with vista. It had worked fine yesterday, but this morning had exactly the same problem. The friend had also tried connecting via a wired network but that failed because the laptop was set to use a static IP, I changed that to DHCP to fix the wired connection. Then I rechecked the wifi link and discovered that it was working. Sorry not to be more help. – Phil Jan 12 '11 at 20:54
When in doubt, try restarting the network. Shut everything down (no particular order) and/or unplug the power. Then, power up devices one at a time (wait for all power-up operations to complete on each device before moving on) starting with your Internet gateway (Cable/DSL modem, or similar device) and following the network path to your computer. – Iszi Jan 12 '11 at 21:04

migrated from stackoverflow.com Jun 1 '10 at 7:25

1 Answer

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Did you try changing the channel?

If you have your router set to automatically select a channel, it's possible that it selected a channel that your PC doesn't work with very well, or one that is experiencing more interference in the part of your house where your PC is. Antenna designs and internal sources of interference can make some channels worse for some machines and not others. Try manually selecting a channel and moving to the other end of the band.

Is there any chance your wireless router complies with European (ETSI) regulatory standards, but your PC's wireless card is a North American (FCC) model? ETSI has 13 channels in 2.4GHz, but FCC only has 11. If your router selected channel 12 or 13 this time, your FCC card wouldn't be able to work with it. Nowadays many cards are "world" cards that switch from FCC to ETSI mode when they have reason to believe they're in an ETSI-style region, but it's possible that some cards on the market still don't have that feature.

Even if you weren't using automatic channel selection, it's possible that a neighbor started using the channel you were on, and that the interfering signal is strongest where your PC is. The solution for that is the same: Try changing the channel.

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