wireless access on home network

[spinn]

I have a Netgear MR314 router and a Netgear MA401 wireless NIC. I can connect to my home network, but everytime it senses a new network (neighbors) it drops my current connection and I have to reconnect. Am I missing some setting in WinXP?? Anyone know what I can do? Help!!!

 

[iamnotaplant]

what you can try to do is setup your wireless card in the network options (display available wireless networks, on the task bar) to be top priority over other networks.
* choose view wireless network connections, then choose advanced, then make sure that your connection is all the way up on the list... hope that works.

 

[spinn]

I set it up previously as the preferred connection, but that didn't seem to help.

 

[jackschmittusa]

I don't have a wireless setup to reference, but I seem to remember that there is a checkbox somewhere for either connecting to only preferred networks or not connecting to any available network.

 

[iamnotaplant]

you might want to manually connect to your wireless network and not let windows connect for you.... i dont have a network connection open right now (i steal my neighbors when i can....) to reference on how to go about doing that, but if you manually connect then you should have the option to connect automatically, and as for jackshmittusa comments... i remember seeing this somewhere also... if i find out where or if i head on out to the city where i can play with everyones connections and find i fix ill post it.
good luck

 

[iamnotaplant]

also... make sure that "automatically connect to non preferend networks" check box is not on....manually connecting might be the best way to go though....

 

[wjsulliv]

There are several things that could/will help you. I had a similar problem and did all of the following, and now I never have a problem.


1) Change your wireless network to a different channel. I.e. get off the factory default channel. For D-Link equipment this is channel 6, I'm now on channel 4.
2) Name your wireless network something besides the default name. I.e. call you network something like your last name, dogs name, etc. For D-Link equipment the factory name is 'default', now I'm on a network named after my last name.
3) Setup encryption on your network. A simple way to do this is to use 64-bit hex encryption which requires 10 alpha-numeric characters 0-9 or a-f. I would recommend your phone number with area code (10 digits). Unless you need more protection than that.

Basically, after doing the following and connecting to that network, I always connect to that network, without problems. I think it has to do with the encryption key. Since I had to enter it into windows, it remembers that as the most prefered network.

 

[spinn]

I think this is more an issue of the PC Card rather than the router. I have the router set to only allow PC Cards with the corrct MAC Address, so I don't think anyone else is able to log in. I'm going to switch to manual connect and not let Windows do it automatically and see what happens from there. Any other ideas?