One laptop is preventing other laptops from accessing the internet

Hello everyone, I have a weird problem with the wireless network at my house. I have 2 other roommates and we each have different laptops (IBM, Dell, Apple). My roommate with the Apple and myself can be online using the wireless no problem (we use a Linksys WRT54G router), however whenever my other roommate with the Dell turns his computer on we both cannot access any webpages even though we are technically connected to the internet with IP's. We each have different IP addresses so there seems to be no conflict there. And as soon as the Dell is turned off both the IBM and Apple computers have no problem using the internet anymore. The Dell also conflicts with our Xbox and PS3's whenever were online with those. It seems that whenever the Dell is on no one else can use the internet. When the Dell is on he can access the internet but no one else.

My roommate with the Dell has spyware issues we believe because he can't even run Adware successfully for some reason. Is it a spyware issue and maybe because the Dell has spyware on there that it's blocking everyone from accessing the internet when the computer is on? Or is it a networking issue with our router? Any help would be appreciated, I haven't found any topics like this online and we haven't been able to fix this problem even with reseting our router connections. Thanks.

 

That's an odd one. If you're all pulling separate non-conflicting IPs from the router, the only thing I could think of that would be making the other computers not work would be that the Dell is tying up all the bandwidth over the connection and choking out the other computers.

If the other computers already have bandwidth tied up downloading something, and you turn the Dell on, does the download stop or just slow down? Better yet, do the connections on the computers just terminate outright, as in they disconnect from the router, or do you just lose the ability to connect to sites or ping anything? It could be a weird problem with the Dell being given all the bandwidth by the router for some reason or it could be a virus or spyware designed to use all free bandwith on the system to mass mail or do some other despicable thing, though usually programs like that are designed to take up only as much as they need and not draw attention to themselves by doing something like this.

Does the problem happen regardless of whether you plug the Dell in or use it wirelessly? Your friend might want to try SpyBot Search and Destroy, as well as Ad Aware, and run them from Safe Mode to see if they'll work from there. For that matter, you might try having him run from Safe Mode with Networking just to see if the problem manifests itself in that mode. If running in Safe Mode with Networking doesn't cause the problem, then you know it's probably a piece of software on the computer eating up the bandwidth in regular mode.

If software isn't the culprit, you might try manually assigning all your IP addresses, to make sure there isn't some sort of DHCP problem causing it to give the Dell a conflicting IP or not being able to handle all the IP assignments after it talks to the Dell. You could reset and reconfigure the router to see if that helps. When push comes to shove, you could reinstall the OS on the Dell or you might try booting off a Linux CD and see if the problem happens there to determine if it's software or hardware related. If a totally different OS causes the same problem, it'd have to be the router or Dell's network hardware.

Hope some of that may help you in the right direction.

 

Thanks for your help Joe! I'll have to try that out tomorrow. When the Dell is turned on the other laptops still show signals to the router and can or remain connected to the router with individual IP's, however neither of the other laptops can surf the web while the Dell is on. I'm not sure whether the Dell being on affects downloads that were happening before the Dell was turned on. And again, once the Dell is turned off the other laptops can view web pages and make downloads with no problems.

So far the Dell has only been used wirelessly, but we will certainly try out those other options you described as soon as we can.

If anyone else has any possible input I would love to hear it. Thanks for the help.

 

Sounds like the dell may have an early 11n card that needs firmware update. The early 11n v1 spec did not address playing well with others. Needs to update the drives.