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I recently purchased a new Wireless-N router for my home. There are two notebook PCs at home already using it. One is quite old, so I had to disable the Wireless-N features and use WEP security.

Both PCs connect fine, and work flawlessly.

At work I use an IBM Thinkpad T42, running Windows 2003. It connects to wifi at work (also WEP), and whenever I'm on the road without any problems. However, last weekend I took it home and configured it to work with my new router.

It will connect, but it loses connection every few minutes. This gets progressivley worse until the connection is going up and down like a yo-yo. Eventually the wifi driver seems to crash completely (attempts to disable or adjust wifi settings just hang, and the only way to get it back is a reboot)

I have attempted reinstalling the wifi drivers, I've attempted rolling back wifi drivers to an earlier version. I was sitting about 2m from the router (signal strength excellent).

Clearly there's something in the combination of my new router (TP-Link TL-WR941ND) and old work-notebook wifi card (Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI), but I have no idea what it could be!

The connection is fine if I use a cable instead of wifi, but I'd really like to be able to carry my notebook into the bedroom or den occaissionally!

Any suggestions or possible workarounds?

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2 Answers

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Don't know if it'll fix the issue, but generally changing the wifi channel can help with these sorts of problems. Worth a try?

Any router firmware updates possible?

Does the work machine work any differently with Wireless-N (if capable)? What about disabling the security (temporarily)? Any change?

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Changed the channel for 6 to 8. And now it works just fine. – rwired Oct 12 '09 at 15:32
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This is most probably interference related and not software configuration related.

If the connection degrades over time, it must be related to interference with other devices (not necessarily PC I must note) as the algorithm for -N is very much adaptive. I would recommend:

  • changing the physical location of the -N router and
  • look for sources of interference
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