Having difficulty detecting AP with cousin's laptop

[DWW]

Cousin has a laptop with builtin wireless: Realtek RTL8180 Wireless LAN (Mini-)PCI NIC

Proper drivers are installed.

I have it located in the same room as my Linksys WRT54G access point while I'm setting it up.

Note: The AP has an (unusual?) channel of 9 (2.4526 GHz). I've disabled WEP and enabled SSID broadcast to rule out any problems. I can see the wireless network fine (from Kismet on my laptop )

When I enable the interface on his laptop, I hit "refresh" in the windows wireless interface properties to try and get a list of all access points. However none are displayed.

Really lost because I've never done Wifi on XP

I don't think its the automatic wifi service problem (where you have to disable the service) because that is known just for dropping randomly (at least, as far as I know) but it is NOT known for not showing any access points at all.

It may be something minor, I don't know. Please help

 

[amdskip]

Right click on the wireless connection not connected icon in the taskbar and select view available wireless networks. Choose the network and check allow me to connect even though the network is not secure.

 

[DWW]

Network doesn't even appear though. (none for that matter)

 

[DWW]

Reset the AP to factory defaults (channel 6) and it still can't pick up.

WTF

(oh and I tried disabling the zero configuration wifi service)

 

[boran]

Originally posted by: DWW
Reset the AP to factory defaults (channel 6) and it still can't pick up.

WTF

(oh and I tried disabling the zero configuration wifi service)

Re-enable it, you need that service for more than it seems. caused lotsa problems here when I disabled it (tho it wasnt appearently caused by lack of that service, re-enabling that service solved the problems)

 

[kami333]

Make sure the laptop doesn't have a hardware switch for the wireless network card, it can show up in windows as enabled even though it isn't.

 

[DWW]

Thanks for the tips. I looked aroudn and on the bottom of the laptop for a switch but couldn't find any

If worst comes to worse I'll just let him borrow a PCMCIA wifi card I have but I'd prefer if he used his own, built in one.

 

[DWW]

Sigh

There WAS an antenna button and it was amongst other ones right above the keyboard. I saw a bluetooth one but ruled it out. The WLAN one was somewhat deceving

Have it working now and all is good