Problem With My Wifi Access

[vagabond48]

I hope someone who is communication savvy can advise me. Sorry for very the long message.

I live in a multi apartment building which has TOT internet. I access the internet via wifi. Each of the 4 floors has its own access point. I am using a Dell lattitude D630 with an Intel wifi card.

Several days ago, I was unable to access the internet for 2 hours after being up for a good part of the day. The wifi connection was up with a strong signal while the internet was down. I attribute the problem to TOT being down which does happen often enough. Before powering off the building's modem downstairs, I decided to check if my neighbor downstairs who although has his own TT&T line recently got a 2nd laptop which he connects to the building's wifi. He was connected to the internet via wifi but from the 2nd floor access point. I brought my laptop to his room and I still couldn't connect from the access point he was using. I went back to my room and tried again with no luck. I turned off my laptop for about 30 minutes. I tried again and got a good connection for the rest of the evening. The same thing happened again the next morning but 1 hour later I got connected so since my laptop is under warranty, I called Dell via the internet. The techie I spoke to who seemed to be knowledgeable ( I used to be an IT director) thought quite strongly that the modem downstairs may be having an intermittent problem with my mac address and would have to be reset by the provider. Since I am covered by the warranty, he said I can replace the wifi card or anything else but he didn't think this would solve the problem. One other problem, over the last 6 months my laptop increasingly has taken over 90 seconds to get an IP address usually returning a 169.xxx address which within seconds changes to 192.xxx working address. Sometimes it was unable to acquire an IP address which has been happening a bit more over the last 3 days. Last night, I turned off the access point I use and then the modem downstairs for 1 minute then after turning them on was able to access the internet again. This morning, I acquired my address instantly and got on the internet but about 1/2 hour later I was down again. I went downstairs and check the modem lights and the adsl and act light were on. I tuned off my laptop and about 30 minutes turned it on acquired my IP address instantly and have been up so far.

Does any techie here have any insight into my problem?

Oh, btw, although I am under international warranty and can replace my wifi card at no charge, before I have someone mucking around with my hardware and installing unnecessary and possibly inferior parts even if it is a authorized Dell repair shop, I want to be certain within reason that this is only solution I have.

Thanks

[stumonster]

the 169.x.x.x address is assigned by windows when you have auto aquire IP from a DHCP server and it does not manage to get an address.

I cannot see them filtering MAC addresses for your wifi access , but you would know that was the case if you had to register your card with them at the beginning.

DHCP does use the MAC address when assigning DHCP IP addresses as it will give you back a previous IP if the lease on it to your NIC has not expired.

when you next have the problem , check to see you have a good signal to the correct AP SSID and then manually assign your card an address righ up the top of the range - maybe 192.168.1.252

is the wifi card an intel card ? are you using the windows wifi manager or the intel one ?

how many wifi APs do you have in your list of APs ? and where in the list is the SSID of the AP in your building ?

[nikster]

Two things come to mind

1 - Update your driver to the latest you can get, sometimes that solves weird issues

2 - In the wifi settings of your computer, delete all saved connections. All access points you were ever connected to get stored as known networks. And sometimes this will cause problems. I have seen laptops get terribly confused particularly when all the access points have the same SSID (name) though that doesn't seem to be the case there, or when they all use the same channel. In any case, wiping the list of known networks can sometimes resolve problems.

[vagabond48]

the 169.x.x.x address is assigned by windows when you have auto aquire IP from a DHCP server and it does not manage to get an address.

I cannot see them filtering MAC addresses for your wifi access , but you would know that was the case if you had to register your card with them at the beginning.

DHCP does use the MAC address when assigning DHCP IP addresses as it will give you back a previous IP if the lease on it to your NIC has not expired.

when you next have the problem , check to see you have a good signal to the correct AP SSID and then manually assign your card an address righ up the top of the range - maybe 192.168.1.252

is the wifi card an intel card ? are you using the windows wifi manager or the intel one ?

how many wifi APs do you have in your list of APs ? and where in the list is the SSID of the AP in your building ?

Like many wifis out there, this one has no security so, there was not registering of my card. The MAC address issue was suggested by the Dell tech guy.

I am not sure what you mean by correst AP SSID. I don't see where I can assign an IP address.

The wifi card is Intel.

I am using the Intel software.

I don't know what a wifi AP is, unless it means Access Point. If yes, there are 4, 1 on each floor each with varying signal strengths.

[vagabond48]

Two things come to mind

1 - Update your driver to the latest you can get, sometimes that solves weird issues

2 - In the wifi settings of your computer, delete all saved connections. All access points you were ever connected to get stored as known networks. And sometimes this will cause problems. I have seen laptops get terribly confused particularly when all the access points have the same SSID (name) though that doesn't seem to be the case there, or when they all use the same channel. In any case, wiping the list of known networks can sometimes resolve problems.

I have the latest driver. Is it worth re-installing it?

Where do I find the saved connections so I can delete them? Remember I am using Intel's software. I didn't find it there.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I am running XP sp2

Edited June 6, 2009 by vagabond48

[stumonster]

right click on the intel proset wifi icon ( bottom right taskbar ) and open

it will give you a list of Access Point SSID's it can see - under profiles you will see a list of AP SSID's you have connected to in the past and set as more than one time conenct

you will see that you can remove old profiles from there.

to manually set an IP - XP classic mode

if you do a start-->run-->cmd for a CLI you can then do ipconfig /all which will give you a list of all your NIC's ( network interface cards )

look for your wifi card and take note of the IP , subnet mask , gateway , DNS server

open settings , network connections , wireless network connection , properties and then scroll till you can highlight TCP/IP and select properties

you will see you can have auto or manual there

auto lets the network card ask the DHCP server running on the network for the info ( IP, mask , gateway , DNS ) - manual you fill in the values yourself

maybe the network has multiple DHCP servers running , 1 on each AP , and that is causing problems , cannot tell with out having access to the routers configs.

the reason I said to manually assign your NIC the IP of 192.168.1.252 ( if your network is handing out 192.168.1.x addresses ) is the DHCP leasing range normally(default) does not hand out there so assigning the IP as 192.168.1.252 should ensure you will not conflict with another IP on the network.

Edited June 6, 2009 by stumonster