Help! - Netgear wireless woes

[Nick]

Hopefully someone can help me with this...

I recently got a Netgear DG834G router and 2 WG311 cards for the 2 computers in the house (both running XP Pro), and I've been tearing my hair out trying to set them up.

The router works perfectly when wired, and I think I've got it set up properly for wireless too (infrastructure mode).

I put card A in PC 1 after installing the drivers - it occasionally finds the router when I scan manually, but never connects to it. Tried the same thing with card B in PC 2, and it finds the network straight away and connects at full speed.

Next, I tried swapping things around - card B in PC 1, card A in PC 2 - and both of them give the same problem as the first time i.e. occasionally finding the network but never connecting :brickwall

So, back to the original setup - card A in PC 1, card B in PC 2 - and now neither machine even sees the network :brickwall :cry:

So, anyone have any ideas?

[Nick]

Anyone?

[BrynJ]

Have you tried going into the router control panel and rebooting the router? I'm sorry to say that I've some experience of this router and its wireless functionality has been, for me, patchy at best - it basically falls over every few hours requiring a reboot to fix.

Have you enabled any kind of encryption? If you want to use WPA make sure you download the relevant XP updates from the Microsoft site.

Any other details would be useful - are you using DHCP? Can you ping the router's ip? If you do an ipconfig /all at the command prompt what does it tell you?

Bryn.

[Nick]

Thanks for the reply.

I've tried rebooting it a couple of times. Haven't set up any encryption yet - i'd like to try and get it working first :)

DHCP is on. Should it be?

I can only ping the router when it's directly connected - when I try after disconnecting the cable, I get 'Destination host unreachable'.

Ipconfig gives the wireless card's media state as 'Media disconnected'

Thanks again

[dbilsborough]

have you got the latest firmware? My D-Link wouldn't work at all, spent ages changing everything, then found a link to a site with a new firmware that was not on the D-Link support site. Updated that and it worked straight away :brickwall

If you have set up the home network using the wizard in XP then DHCP may not work, I had problems with that as well, I had to delete all the network settings that I had with a wired network and let DHCP sort things out instead. There is a section on this in the help pages of XP, just type in DHCP in help (off the start menu) :thumbs:

[BrynJ]

I'd agree with dbilborough - try updating to the latest firmware (I think its 1.5.0). Are your pcs in close proximity to the router? For troubleshooting, its recommended that they are (or at least one of them).

DHCP is definitely the way to go. Are your pcs set to DHCP? (I.E. under your wireless connection properties is it configured to automatically assign ip / gateway / dns ?). Try doing a ipconfig /release and then an ipconfig /renew and see if that changes anything?

Bryn.

[Nick]

I've got the latest firmware (1.05.00) and the router's sitting on top of the PC I'm using at the moment.

I'm using Netgear's 'Smart configuration' software for the setup of the card, rather than XP itself, and I think that's taking care of DHCP when I pick the Infrastructure mode.

OK, I've just PC 2/card B again, and it's working perfectly! :eek:

Still no joy with my main machine, though. Do you think the card's completely buggered, or might there be something else I can fix in the setup?