Wednesday, November 29, 2006

This is really starting to tick me off....

Last Sunday evening my wireless router finally gave up the ghost. It was starting to act kinda squirrelly and needing to be reset pretty often, it finally refused to reset and just kept recycling through it's POST. I had been needing a new one for a while anyway, this router was an old "B" type that did not support WEP. so I went down to Wally World (the only place open at 7:30 pm on a Sunday evening that sold this sort of stuff.) and bought myself a Belkin 802.11g wireless router. I got home and set it up and was able to get my daughter's machine which uses a Dlink 802.11G PCI card to connect using 128 bit WEP without even breaking a sweat. but my other daughter's machine, a rebuilt old P2 Dell running Win 98se (there is a reason it runs win 98se, several of her educational programs, which are hand me downs from my older daughter won't run under 2k or xp, even in so-called "Compatability mode"), using an Airlink 101 MIMO G PCI card refuses to connect. (it connected fine to the old Network Anywhere 802.11b router so I know the card works) I thought perhaps that the channel the card chose was noisy at that range and tried a different channel. no dice. It won't even connect with WEP turned off. Now, I had to re-install the utility software that came with the card to be able to turn WEP encryption on. and I am wondering if it has screwed up the winsock stack or something. Here is the part that really gets me though. I can ping the other machines IP addresses fine. so I know that much of the network hardware/software works. I'm at the end of my rope. If anybody can suggest anything to try I'm all ears. I am contemplating re-installing the OS to try to repair any files/drivers that might have been corrupted, I'm also contemplating yanking the card and going down and buying a dlink card instead of a no-name generic chi-com card. I know some MIMO devices don't play well with some 802.11G devices, Linksys had some problems with that if I recall. so the MIMO bit may be my problem, but if that were the case why would I be able to ping the other machines? I really need the MIMO range though because the machine is a good 40 feet from the router and the other side of two oblique walls.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Being a long-time member of HAL-PC, I would call the ADSL Guru, Ron at 713 993-3330

He is pretty sharp.

The other guy is Dennis Keim, Cyberhouse, 713-428-0147

November 29, 2006 4:20 PM  
Blogger Rorschach said...

Jay Lee seems to think the issue is due to Zone alarm, even with it shut down. He suggests uninstalling it. I'm going to try that tonight and see what happens.

November 29, 2006 4:31 PM  
Blogger Rorschach said...

Update:
Just for sh!ts and giggles (to the tune of about $40!) I went and bought a name brand wireless card and tried it. it too claims to be connected but there is no way to get either firefox or IE to connect. I am able to ping yahoo and other machines on the network, so again i know that the hardware is working, the problem is software. to that end I backed up the data and nuked the machine and rebuilt it. and now I can't even connect on a hardware level. I am really starting to get pissed off now.

December 03, 2006 10:03 PM  
Blogger Rorschach said...

I've finally arrived at a "solution" to this delimma. albeit not the one I intended to. The problem would appear to be a driver issue. Although the drivers claim to be win98 compatible, it would appear they are not. the solution was a dual boot configuration with win2k for networking and win 98 for my kiddo's old incompatable games. Anybody want to buy a slightly used Netgear 802.11G PCI card?

January 10, 2007 4:29 PM  

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