Why does this happen with my network?

I have three laptops in home and my router is Netgear WPN824v2. One of the three laptops has Intel 4965AGN (11n) wifi card, other one has one from dell (11g), and third one has Atheros AR5005GS (11g) card. The third laptop is few years old now, still running XP while other two laptops are using Windows 7. Now here is the problem: First two laptops when connected to Netgear router work fine, no problem whatsoever. But as soon as the third laptop connects to the router, everything goes awry on the network. All three laptops loose internet connection, ping to the router fails, router's web interface becomes unreachable, ping to the modem through the router fails, and ofcourse ping to sites like yahoo or google also either fails (means it says couldn't find the host), or partially (means at least one ping successfully echoes back) or completely times out. Upon multiple refreshes, sometimes one refresh fetches the webpage, which means that the network doesn't completely just die. As soon as the third laptop is disconnected from the network, few minutes later everything becomes normal again on the other two laptops.

I checked and router has the latest firmware. I tried setting the mode of router to "Auto 108Mbps", "B and G", and also "G only", but nothing helps. I have reset it multiple times, still same issue. Why is this happening??? Why doesn't this router like the third laptop?? Any idea guys??

 

Is your router should be setup in Router mode. It does not hurt to clone your MAC address in to the router of the PC used to setup the account. All admin work should be done on a wired connection. Confirm all of your pc's are using DHCP.

You may need to force the 4965AGN card to G only if it's the pc that is messing with your connections. You should test enough to see if it's only one pc that's causing the problem.

Run std 54mbps, not 108

 

These problems suck to diagnose cause it could be a hardware or software problem. In otherwords, it could be anything, anywhere. A lot like chasing UFOs.

If it is software, just use a different driver version. I suggest you try earlier drivers. One thing to understand is the latest driver isn't always the best solution especially if it has not been heavily tested in the wild.

If it is hardware you are out of luck and just gotta get a new wifi card. Life sux doesn't it.

 

The router is doing the DHCP job. Its assigning local IP addresses to all the PCs. I did not understand the part about cloning MAC address into router of PC...

Since its a G router, the 4965AGN is in G mode already and connecting to the router at 54Mbps. Like I said before, its the laptop with Atheros AR5005GS card that is causing the issue.

 

Cloning is a trick to make the router take the MAC address of the PC. This makes the router look like the PC to the provider. So if the ISP is looking at who is connected all they see is one MAC address. The router takes care of the routing the packets to the correct pc. This is normally found on the Internet (WAN) setup, sometimes in the advanced options.

 

You won't need to clone any MAC addresses unless your ISP cuts off your internet.

In that case, just call them up and tell them to register your new MAC address. They'll walk you through the process.

 

MIMO is not standard on anything older than 11n. Also 108Mbps is also not standard for 11g or 11a. Your problem is that you have an access point from one company that can leverage these, yet you have wireless cards from three different manufacturers (Broadcom, Atheros and Intel). Likely your Intel card has some form of MIMO that's compatible with your Netgear router, but in turn it's killing the connection for your other clients and causing collisions because they either support a different means of connecting at higher than 54Mbps or not at all and the result is they are not compatible with each other.


You need to disable 108Mbps on your router and set it for a standard 802.11g connection, while confirming all of your clients are only trying 54Mbps and not 108Mbps "MIMO connect" "super-G" or any other non-standard, proprietary connection schemes.

This is why you don't go with products with properietary technology, or if you know it does, that you will need to likely disable it as it will cause more problems instead.