Windows 7 - Wireless signal strength good - Network often says limited or no activity

Question

I have a new Dell Studio XPS laptop that I hooked up in early January of 2010.

The Dell Studio XPS laptop is connected to my wireless router (Belkin Wireless N). The router was purchased in Februari of 2010 because I thought my router was bad (A D-Link router). Comcast is my ISP.

Everyday, at random times, the internet will have a good signal (according to the little Win 7 icon on the taskbar) but I will receive a message saying limited or no internet access and I cannot access the internet.

I have the internet setup to automatically get an IP and I did the IPCONFIG release / renew but with no success.

I even had a WiFi enabled Blackberry right next to my computer and whenever the computer loses an WiFi connection, so does the Blackberry.

The router isnt't bad, because the old router did the same thing - giving me limited or no internet access while working sometimes.

I also tried using two other laptops in same physical position as my Dell Studio XPS laptop and they have the same problem.

I am going crazy trying to figure this out as I have called the router company (Belkin), my ISP (Comcast), and my computer maker (Dell).

Can anyone offer some suggestions and I can try them as we work through this and maybe one of the suggestion will be right one.

Thanks in advance for even reading my problem. I searched for a problem similar to mine on the internet, but I have not been able to keep a steady internet connection.

(Side note - I used to have an IBM thinkpad laptop and D - Link router and for years that wireless connection worked FLAWLESSLY, with the same physical set up - the laptop in my bedroom, and the router in the basement.)

Solution

I had a Dell 830 that had awful probelms with our wireless router, netgear, I had to statically allocate the IP address to get round the issue. (this is probably unrelated to the problem, it just still irritates me to this day)

Are there other wireless signals in the area, perhaps changing the channel will help. On the router you will be able to see, and change, which channel it uses.

Comments

[Joe Taylor]

I have just got back in from a night out so if you need me to explain better just ask.

[Anthony Trilussa Pizzo]

Thanks for your help. I have about 6 wireless networks that my Dell is detecting. I am not quite sure how to change my wireless channel. There is only one button on the Belkin router and that is the button to "reset" the router. Thanks a million.

[Kez]

Hmm.. if you do ipconfig /all from the command prompt, what does it say your Default Gateway IP address is?

[Joe Taylor]

In your router settings, usually under wireless settings, there will be an option to change the channel. My router has 13 different channels. Try changing it through the different channels and see if any work better for you. I am using a BT HomeHub for my home network, here is an image of the channel settings in there img59.imageshack.us/img59/6923/channelselect.jpg

[Anthony Trilussa Pizzo]

Hi again! thanks for your patience. My internet was down for 3 days. So here is what I did... I did ping 192.168.2.1 -t and got replys from that IP address whenever the internet was working. While the internet was down, I got this message "Reply from 192.168.2.4: Destination host unreachable" (notice the IP address is different - it ends in 4 instead of 1). And then I will get 10 lines of "request timed out" and than the Destination host unreachable. That has happened for the past few days. Any advice on where the blame lies for limited access/no connection lies what be GREATLY apprec

[Anthony Trilussa Pizzo]

hey - I ran the CD that came with my router and I manually changed the wireless channel from 6 to 8. Now the reponse time when I run a ping to ping 192.168.2.1 -t from from an avergage of 300ms to 2ms to get a reply from the IP address. Is that good? Is that a 2ms normal? Thanks, any info on this topic you can give is greatly appreciated since I have never worked with truly manually setting up a router and changing channels. Thanks a million. (sorry for the delayed response, my internet was down for 3 days..let's hope this channel change is what saves my internet!)

[Joe Taylor]

I usually get a response time of under 1ms. But 2ms isn't the end of the world. 300ms seems to imply that somethign was wrong, thats the kind of response time you'd expect pinging a remote site. the fact it was 300ms suggests something was wrong, perhaps interference, were you seeing any dropped replies?

[ganesh]

What is (or was) the IP from your own laptop. I guess that you where the 192.168.2.4.