Did hotel wireless screw me over ?

[rabid]

Not a networking expert.
Have 2 desktops (win2k) 1 laptop (xp home)
All ran perfectly, off the hop, with both a dlink and the upgraded smc
wireless. Went to Buffalo last week, was able to pick up wireless from
my room, signed in and used it....Got home, my wireless does not work
any longer....I get the message "wireless connection unavailable" in
network connections.. When I connect with the cat cable everything
works, its only wireless...

I have tried the following...
I updated to latest firmware for smc router
wep disabled in router, and in wireless connection properties
firewall on laptop disabled
Removal and reinstall of nic, wireless, 1394, mac in device manager
Moving stuff to and from "network bridge"
latest drivers installed for the wireless card - intersil prism
wireless lan pci card
ssid is being broadcast, the prism software shows it scanning right
past the channel
authentication on and off
dhcp is enabled and strangely enough I can see it in the router
software in the dhcp client log

everything was working perfectly before. My laptop is 10 feet from the
router, even tried it 2 feet away. Why is this not working ? When I
run the connection wizard it shows the wireless card as " disconnected
hardware:" . Wireless available networks show nothing, I deleted the
hotel in preferred networks... My buddy also connects via wireless
using my network but he is not here. If he was, at least he could
confirm or not if the router was somehow the problem

appreciate any comments, about 3 hours troubleshooting this so far...
next step Maybe I will reimage from 3 months ago and see if it will
work

thanks

 

[Jim]

Is your router broadcasting it's SSID? If not, enable it. Second, out of
curiosity, try changing the SSID to same one used at the hotel (both router
and client). If that works, then change them back to your original SSID,
check again.

What I'm thinking here is that somehow the adapter is confused, possibly
because your home and hotel used the same SSID?? Or your home router is not
broadcasting, but the hotel was, etc.

One other possibility is that if you have broadcasting OFF (I'm talking
about the "broadcasted" SSID, the top box in the Windows Wireless config
dialog, not the preferred network, below it, that could simply have been
obtained from a prior broadcast), and a neighbor has their broadcasting ON,
your client will *always* attempt to attach to the neighbor's wireless
system, even if your client and router's SSID match, and the neighbor's
doesn't ( http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;811427 ).

HTH

Jim

 

[rabid]

Thanks Jim

I'm broadcasting ssid...
the laptop scans all and doesn't pick up any...
I will try to set it to one channel - did that already but try it
again..

Randall

 

[rabid]

I have reimaged the hard drive to bring it back to november...
This still does not work...Since I got it to work in 2 mins when
I got the new wireless router and I'm quite sure its not a software
config problem, the only real possibilities are bad wireless pci card
in the laptop or the router has gone bad....When my buddy comes over
we will see if he can wireless connect to determine which is the case

cheers