Weak Internet connection

[Tales]

Just bought £700 laptop and it's awesome, but I have one problem; the Internet connection is horrible from my room. Is there any way I can make the signal stronger without having to move the laptop to the living room?(which defeats half of the point of buying my own laptop)

[Sanchez]

Move the router closer, buy a stronger antenna(for the router). There are these things called signal strengtheners or something but I don't know if they actually work.

[Guest Jordan]

You have a few choices.

 

• Go wired (get ethernet cable'd up).
   
  
• Get homeplug (creates a network through your electrical system, costs alot however [£80 for 2 adapters] and would require another wireless router on your end.
   
  
• Get a wireless 'extender' it plugs into your router and increases the signal strength.
   
  
• The cheap way, get a bigger wireless aerial. Standard is 4 decibels, i have a 9dB in my flat so that i get a decent signal strength.
   
  
• Or finally, knock a wall or two down.
  

 

Rule of thumb is, wireless is fucking shit. I hate using it.

[Tales]

Thanks, but I just discovered that the reason I can't connect to my father's router isn't because of weak connection(using my neighbour's now), but for some unknown reason, I can't connect at all, even if I move my laptop closer. Appearently, my sister have the same problem, but my father works perfectly. How annoying it is to be told over and over that his cost £350 >_>

The laptop cannot identify the problem and I have no idea either. Is there something I have to do to connect properly?

 

 

Even if I could connect, I still need stronger signal, so any recommendations for nr 3 and 4? You really made laugh of nr. 5. I have two walls between the router and my room and since I got the Wii I have learned to really, really hate them >_>

 

Thank you very much.

[Guest Jordan]

Okay.

 

This is router settings, go to your dads laptop and type in IE: http://192.168.0.1

 

Tell me what that gives you.

[Tales]

I'm asked to enter an username and password. I very much doubt my father knows it, but I'll ask if you need more info.

[Sanchez]

Try admin and admin.

 

Or if you give me the router name i can find out. I'm fairly sure admin covers most routers.

[Tales]

That didn't work. The router is a D-Link 514 v B.

 

Btw, I tried the down arrow and got a list of all the family's e-mail adresses as options for admin username 0_o

[Sanchez]

try admin for the username and blank (as in don't type anything) for the password.

[Tales]

That worked, and I got access to some kind of the router's home page. Now what? Tried to change the channel number to 1 as I have heard it works better with Wii, but nothing happened with my laptop.

[Guest Jordan]

You need to add the laptop's mac address.

 

Do you know how to do that?

[Tales]

Do you really think I have any idea at all?

 

I find turning on the computer as a great achievement.

[Guest Jordan]

Anyone got any experience with linksys router admin consoles? >_>

[Sanchez]

It's a D-Link, if it was a linksys I could help.

[Tales]

So no ideas? As said, all other laptops can connect to the router, but not mine. Is there something I have to do on my laptop?

[McPhee]

Take a few screen shots then we should be able to help you out. At the moment we're firing blind

[tapedeck]

I had similar problems when I got my laptop. (Different router though).

 

Basically I googled it and in conjunction with teh action router/laptop website, sussed it out myself with their "not so helpful" guides.

[Tales]

Someone suggested that I should give my laptop an unique IP-adress myself as the router may not be able to do it, but how do I do it? Tell me how to do it on Linksys or whatever you use, at least it can give me a hint or two because I have no idea what to do where.

[Rummy]

Before you follow any of my advice, be aware that you might somehow end up affecting other people's access to the internet through your router, so don't do this if you're worried about messing things up, or if you don't think you'll be able to undo what you've done. For anyone who wants to try and help him out, but doesn't know what the router's interface is like, here's an emulator from d-link's site

 

I've got a D-Link 524, hopefully there isn't much difference. To set it up to lease your specific laptop an IP, you're gonna need to find out the mac address of your laptop's wireless adapter. Normally you'd be able to just clone it, but you aren't gonna be able to do that if your laptop can't connect through it. I'm not sure how you can find out the mac address of it without being connected to something, so connect to something through the wireless, go into network connections, right click the wireless one and select Status(which is greyed out when not connected, i think), then look for Details, which'll pop up a window with some stuff, look for Physical Address and make a note of it(should be in the form XX-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX, Xs being 0-9 or A-F).

Anyway, once you have the mac address, use another computer which can connect to the router, open up the router's page and look for DHCP down the left hand side(should open up under the 'Home' tab already). You should hopefully be near here;

I imagine DHCP server is disabled, which is why your laptop can't be leased an IP. Check down to the bottom where it says Static DHCP Client list, and see if there are devices listed in there or not. If not, then your dynamic DHCP probably is turned on, but limited to the number of devices which can conncect?

Anyway, look back up to Static DHCP as in the picture, then just fill in the boxes underneath to give your laptop a set IP on the network. Name can be whatever you want, the last bit of the IP box can be whatever you want from like, but I usually keep it near the router's own address(in the 100s, go for 115, i doubt anything else will have it). Fill in the MAC address you made a note of earlier, and click apply. Make sure you've selected the Enabled radio button just above the settings, and ignore the DHCP client drop down box.

That'll basically make the router assign your laptop an IP whenever it connects wirelessly, make sure you've used the MAC for the wireless adapter in the laptop, if you wire it in it'll use a different bit of hardware and therefore a different MAC code. I dunno if this is what's actually causing your problem, so apologies if it doesn't solve it, there's not alot to go on to determine what the problem is.

[Tales]

It didn't work. I don't know if it is supposed to appear in the list below, but it didn't. Maybe I got the wrong mac address. I don't have an english version on my laptop so I'm not sure where to look, but I found one place where it said "mac address not available" Tried google and by typing in a command in the search box to look for it a while ago, but I don't if it's the right one. The picture look just like mine btw.

 

Thanks anyway. I called the Toshiba's customer support yesterday and they were more than willing to help me. They are going to send me a link to an XP driver as it has helped Vista users before. Still waiting though >_>