Wireless Connectivity
 

My mother has a new Dell laptop and connects to our wireless network at home via our Linksys router. The only problem is that she "loses" the connection a couple times a day, only to reconnect 5 seconds after it. Often times she is forced to use the "repair connection" feature in WinXP.

Anyone know what would be causing this to happen so often?

I honestly don't know. My bro has an ancient laptop which I've patched up for him, running Win98. It loses connection a lot too. When he boots it up, it takes forever for him to associate with the access point. I feel bad but there is little I can do, so I just blame the OS.

Does the repair connection feature work all of the time?

I would suggest calling Linksys the support is free and they should be able to solve the problem. I had some issues with my wireless router too and found the support to be pretty good

Their support is so-so. I give them a lot of respect because they're not jerks and a good number of them are right here in the USA, at least on the phone. AFAIK I've talked to one guy on the phone and one guy via chat. The guy on the phone was clearly a southerner, and the guy in the chatroom deally was clearly foreign.

But both of them were equally useless.

Soccerchamp, Do you think it's a signal quality issue? What's the signal level when the connection is working? When it stops?

Any common factor when it gives her problems, like distance from WAP, a certain room, laptop orientation, or end of the house, someone using a microwave oven or wireless (2.4GHz) telephone?

Many neighborhoods are becoming saturated with 2.4GHz. Try a network scan to see how many are sharing your channel.

Yeah, if it's only disconnecting for a short burst like that, some sort of freak interfernce is liable.

Try changing the channel I guess :-/