I’ve had a wireless network for several years, and until a couple of months ago, it operated perfectly, with an Apple Airport as the router.
Then all of a sudden, all hell broke loose. Both my iBook and Dell Inspiron laptop were dropping network connections on a regular basis.
I brought the Airport in to my local Apple reseller, and they convinced me to upgrade both hardware and software, which I did. Still had problems.
Hired a rent-a-geek who claimed to know both Macs and PCs, and he couldn’t figure it out, either. He thought the issue was some kind of WEP incompatibility, which turned out not to be the case. The tech support people at his company yelled at me on the phone when I called to exercise the warranty they supposedly provide, claiming that his notes indicated that one of the wireless cards was failing and why was I so stupid anyway.
At this point, I was bleeding time and money and pretty much gave up on ever finding a real solution. This was more than an inconvenience, it was an embarassment: once a customer called, and I had to tell him that I couldn’t look at his website because my Internet connection was down – great, real professional.
Then two days ago, I started using my laptop in a different room. I haven’t (KOWood) had a problem since.
Mind you, I don’t exactly live in a mansion, but something about the architecture of this house, or the appliances or the cordless phone apparently interferes with the wireless signal, even when I was operating the Dell laptop RIGHT NEXT to the Airport.
I asked Peter, who is a lot more savvy about hardware than I am, about this yesterday, and even he was puzzled, although he’s noticed similar strange things in the past.
If Peter doesn’t know, then I for sure don’t, but I wish the stupid rent-a-geek or the people in the Apple store had been savvy enough to suggest something this easy in the first place.