losing mapped drives with wireless network

[Ken Hubel]

Hi,
I am having problem in my new school lab keeping mapped
drives over a wireless network with the clients running XP
pro. The drives I am mapping to are on a w2k server that
is not wireless. This is a simple network with no domain.
The access point is in the same room and the signal is
strong. Even though I get an error message from the
clients at startup that says the client is unable to
connect to the mapped drive, I have found that this is not
100% true. I am still able to run some programs on the
client that require the use of the mapped drive. However,
one of the programs, that perhaps is requiring more
network usage, often fails. The access point
(Proxim/Orinoco AP600) is connected to the same switch
that the server is connected to, so it isn't a problem
with too many hops. I have upgraded the firmware on the
access point and I have downloaded XP pro updates as well.
If I hardwire a client to the network, the problem is
solved instantly. I am to the point now that I am
considering hardwiring the entire lab, or donwgrading the
clients to Win98, neither of which I am too enthused
about. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Ken Hubel

 

[Bruce Wilcox]

What hardware are you using in the laptops? Do you have
any encryption turned on? Are the machines logging into
any kind of domain? Try performing an extended ping test
and see what the results are.

Post the results and we can go from there.

Bruce

 

[Ken Hubel]

Hi Bruce,
The desktops are using Orinoco PCI wireless network
cards. The CPU is a Celeron 2Ghz. There is 256 MB RAM.
The machines are not logging on to a domain. Encryption
is off. Here are the results of the ping test to the
server from a workstation. Packets Sent:105,
Received:105, Lost:0, Min Time:1ms, Max:3ms, Avg:1ms. A
ping test to the access point gave similar results.
Thanks,
Ken