wifi won't stay connected

[mia-rae]

I connect to wifi linksys connection wrt54g and it will not stay connected, connection disappears. It will say the connection is hidden, unknown reason, user action has expired, and many other random reasons. Sometimes it says it identifying or unidentifying for 5 minutes or longer with no connection. No one else has this problem with this connection and my laptop is 5 months old. The button on my laptop is worn down from consistently trying to reconnect...seriously.

My wifi will not stay connected, say's it identifying, unidentifying, user action expired. Diagnostic say's wifi is hidden or setting are wrong. But, i do stay connected for short periods of time and other people on the same connection have no problems. i'm using a new toshiba lap top, running vista


Thank you in advance!

[bani-banan]

How far are you from the router?

Thick walls, micro wave ovens and such things do kill the signal.

Run NetStumbler to see whether or not you have a strong signal.


Do you have a hidden SSID? (Doesn't really matter).

Try disabling WEP/WPA/WPA2 encryption.

What kind of computer is it?

In case things get better after disabling encryption - report back.

[mia-rae]

Nobody elese has a problem conecting to the same signal with the same computer toshiba both 5 months old. The signal is full bars and i we have ready tried diableing and rebutting the WEP/WPA/WPA2 encryption.

[white]

Sounds like a hardware problem to me. Try updating your wireless drivers and then test your connection with Netstumbler running in the background as Bani said. You might want to also try Safe mode w/ Networking if that doesn't work.

[burkhartmj]

It's definitely hardware. I had the same issue with my previous laptop. the realtek 802.11G internal card couldn't stay connected to any network, encrypted or unencrypted, and it didn't matter what drivers I used. Get a new internal card or PC card adapter and you should be golden [what I did, got an internal ASUS card, which was a big mistake because of drivers, then a belkin expresscard adpter, which was great].

[dtkflex]

Are there any other wi-fi routers in the area that you can try to connect to?

If you can connect to another router, there may be some configuration issues with your current setup.

[computoman]

Local computer user groups, colleges, libraries, barnes and noble bookstores, amd some mcdonald restarants usually have free wifi. The would be good test bed if there are no unsecured routers for you to access. I might also suggest that you change the frequencys on your router and laptop (they need to be the same) to make sure there is no rf interferance.

[burkhartmj]

Unfortunately you have to take any positive results with insecure routers with a grain of salt. My defective card could sustain a connection without encryption on any router, but as soon as encryption was involved [again, on any router] it would stop connecting and just say "identifying" until it gave up. Eventually it got to the point of not being able to successfully connect to any router under any conditions, but that took awhile.