Can a Vista Laptop brng down a whole home network?

Hi Guys,
I have a network setup at home that has been working flawlessly for the last year or so but all that has changed now and the only difference is having a new laptop.

The old config of the network was a Motorala Surfboard cable modem connected to a Netgear WGT624 wireless router. Connected to the router are a desktop computer (connected by ethernet cable, running Windows XP Home SP2), a Dell Inspiron 9300 (connected by wireless, running Win XP Home SP2), an old Dell PowerEdge acting as a NAS box (connected by ethernet cable, running FreeNAS) and a Mvix HD760 (connected by wireless).

All that has been working great, i can always access the web (and network) from either Windows machine, the NAS is always there and the Mvix will stream movies all day long.

The new laptop ( a Dell XPS 1730 running Vista Home Premium SP1) has replaced the older desktop machine.

Now i have the problem that my Mvix is allways stuttering (not getting a full speed conection i guess) and i loose the internet on a regular basis on my laptop.

I have tried settign different address ranges, different wireless channels etc and nothing seems to work.

Is it possible that have a vista machine plugged into my netwrok could have caused all this instability?


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Well its hard to say definitely but i highly doubt it... Try leaving that laptop off for a day and see if the same problem occurs. The automatic desire to blame vista for problems is really kind of silly...

 

I don;t think thinking vista is a problem is silly. The network system i have in place was fine until i plugged a Vista based laptop into it. So i assumed it might have something to do with that.

Vista has some new network discovery and profiling tools built in, maybe they are affecting the bandwidth of the router. There is something screwing going on with the wireless parts ability to transmit data.

I used to be able to stream divx/xvid/mpg/DVD-ISO files over the wirless netwrok to my Mvix and laptop. Now i loose the conection to the file on my laptop and the Mvix stutters, stops and then finally picks up the stream again.

I will try the system with the Vista machine disconnected and see what happens.

 

At this point, the only way to determine if _Vista is causing the problem is, as hawkshark said, and as you've agreed, to test the situation by running the network both with, and without, the laptop in question. Unfortunately, while the initial set of events does suggest a line of inquiry, it does not, by itself, provide any proof of the cause, because there is no way, based solely on the addition of a new laptop with _Vista to the network, to distinguish correlation from causation - i.e., you have a correlation, but no means of telling whether that correlation resulted from causation or coincidence.

 

Did you clone the MAC address of the pc used to setup the account into the router? Since you replace the machine your ISP may not have the MAC address registered with them. May need to have your ISP reset the mac address to the routers, or clone the pc into the routers and have them use that. In any case if you do not have the original MAC address you may need to call them.

 

My ISP does not need the MAC address of any computers on my network. The internet connection i have coming is through a cable modem that has its own MAC address. That connection is then passed onto my router and split as needed.

 

This is probably another long shot, but have you downloaded from Microsoft and installed on the XP machines the Link Layer Topology Discovery("LLTD") responder?

As described in KB922120, _Vista uses LLTD to find out what's on the network it's connected to and where. However, unless an XP machine has the LLTD responder installed, the XP machine cannot respond to the queries sent out by the _Vista machine and, as a consequence, the XP machines may not exist as far as the _Vista machine is concerned.

Thus, if LLTD isn't installed on your XP machines, the KB from Microsoft suggests that the _Vista system might have fooled itself into thinking that it's all alone on the wireless network, and may be trying to aggressively grab as much airtime as possible, and may be treating the other systems as mere interference that must be overcome by increasing the aggressiveness of the _Vista signal. That could, under the right circumstances, result in the _Vista machine being such an air-hog that other systems get kicked off, and still others suffer such a drop in performance that they begin to stutter.

 

I was just coming on to post that i may have fixed the problem. And it has to do with your last post shyster.

I have disabled the link layer topography bits on the Vista laptop and my network seems to be back to normal. We have played a couple of DVDs and about half of season 3 of RObot Chicken without any glitches.

After doing a bit of reading about the LLTD stuff, i found that there are no devices (other than Vista machines) that can actually use it. So my router wa getting pinged with packets it didn't recognise and eventually would just crap itself

 

I'm wondering if there is a firmware update for your router to deal with this because I have a 2yr old linksys G (the one everyone else has but I forget the model) and it was fine with 2 new vista laptops connected via WiFi and my new WRT600N also works fine.

 

i have checked. the ltests firmware for my router was release in march 2005. There have been two new versions of my router (same model number, i am ussiming upgrade internals) since then. So while the WGT624 maybe vista compatible, the earlier version are not.