Connection Troubles

[Tarrant64]

I am having an issue with my wireless nic for my desktop keeping a connection. It was working just fine for the past 5 hours i've been up, but just now i'm having troubles that I had yesterday. First off, I had the regular linksys wireless g nic card before this one. It broke, so i thought i'd spend the extra bucks and get the speedbooster one. My problem is that I've just now moved downstairs where I am now 1 wall away from my wireless AP, and My connection flip flops between 54mb to 5.5mb, and sometimes 1. When i was upstairs I figured maybe it was just too far away, but i didn't think getting 1.0-1.1mb upstairs sounded right.
Often, I won't even be able to connect to it at all. I was using WinXP Pro SP1 before I updated and it would tell me my wireless network was there, but wouldn't let me connect to it. Now i'm on WinXP Pro SP2 and it was fine for a few hours, but now i'm back to square one. I had rebooted my computer and when it came back up, viola, i'm having problems connecting again.

Could this be a virus? A Hardware problem? Anyone have similar experiences? This is really getting frustrating for me as I have not been to bed yet trying to get it to work. Ah...behold...it's 5:30am already.

Thanks

 

[ScottMac]

"One Wall Away" - 2.4G signals do not penetrate much, if at all ..... they bounce.

Water / things with water (like people) soak up the signal pretty well. Is it possible that the signal strength fluctuations are just people walking in the way of the signal?

It's usually a good idea to get all the altitude you can on the AP to avoid "mobile obstruction" and maintain line of sight.

It may help to think of the radio signal as if it were light (roughly the same behavior) ... There's direct, indirect (bounced), and shodows of varying intensity. Move the AP and / or antenna around a little and the signal is likely to change.

The wavelength at 2.4G is about five inches, so movement of either ~2,5 inches can make a diference. Give the system time to re-post the signal strengths between movements.

Good Luck

Scott