Need answers to weird wi-fi problems

For several years my friend has been wirelessly using an old XP SP3 laptop at her place of work. She recently brought it home and told me it won't connect to her home network.

I took an old XP SP3 laptop of mine over to her house. She connects using a combination modem/router she got from her ISP. The network name and password are on the bottom of the device, and my old XP connected immediately, while hers would only give her limited connectivity. A repair of her wireless gave me a certificate error, so I removed the check mark from 1EEE 802.1 authentication and figured it was gonna be good.

Wrong.... In the properties for her network it lists the data encryption as WEP and there's a check mark in the box that says the key is provided for me automatically. When I remove the check mark and entered the key I got the network password needs to be 40bits or 104 bits depending on your network configuration.

Then it gets weird...

I took both of the laptops home with me. Both of them connect wirelessly to my network. I also have a combo modem and router from the same ISP as my friend, although mine is a newer model. When I go into wireless network connections on her laptop (at my house) and look at my network properties, it also says my data encryption is WEP, although there is no check mark in the key is provided for me automatically box, and I can see the black dots in my network key box. When I click on her network's properties, remove the check and manually enter her key I still get the same '40 bits or 104 bits error' that I did at her house.

So that's it. My laptop (and others at her house) connects to her network. Hers does not. Both connect perfectly to my network. Both houses use modem/routers from the same provider. Both have WEP encryption. Both laptops run XP SP3. I'm missing something.

 

If it is not connecting at her place, reset the router, and make sure that you set a good key and redo the admin password to the router, so no one can get into the administrator pages, or change settings.

There is a lot of good info at http://www.ezlan.net

 

While I was, uh... waiting for an answer here,.. I discovered something...

Both laptops are still my house, where they both connect. On her laptop, when I look at the properties of the preferred networks, both her network and mine have a Network Authentication of Open and a Data Encryption of WEP.

On my laptop, when I look at the properties of the preferred networks, only my network has a Network Authentication of Open and a Data Encryption of WEP, while her network has a Network Authentication of WPA-PSK and a Data Encryption of TKIP.

On her laptop, the pulldown on her network properties only lets me choose between Open or Sharing for Network Authentication and WEP or Disabled for Data Encryption.

Apparently the router she was using at her work supported WEP encryption, as does my combination router/modem. Her router/modem, supplied by her ISP apparently does not. I'm not sure, at this point, if her ISP can change the settings of their product.

Her laptop, an IBM ThinkPad, does not use an internal wireless adapter. Instead it has this gigantic Netopia 802.11b card that slides into a deep slot on the side. It looks like something out of the 1990's and I don't think it's updatable to use WPA authentication. To make matters worse the ThinkPad possesses only a single USB port which is being used for a mouse.

 

Is the Thinkpad using XP's Wireless Zero config, or IBM's wifi config? If it is using the IBM wireless config, disable that and use the XP Service instead.

As for the Netopia, yep that can be half the problem. If it was issued by her company, they should be updating the machines with USB Wireless-G/N dongles, and get away from Wireless-B. I know that it is great for long distances, but if you get on networks that have 25meg or higher, you create a choke point with that adapter.