Home Wireless, unable to connect

Hi, how far away from the router are you? Wireless, as you now know, is easy. Turn it on and connect. I have frequent problems myself getting a good connection with my laptop. I can be 30 feet away and its fine on my end table, put it on my lap and the signal goes to low, with the card pointing away from the router. I know, this isnt a great answer, but as neat as wireless is, the technology is not all that great. You might consider a wireless booster, but thats expensive. Other things can interfere, TV, radio, other wireless items (cell phones, wireless phones) microwaves and more. You need to look around to see if you can fix these things. A couple sugestions:

Change the channel of your router. 1,6 or 1 can be best. If your neighbor has a router, there could be another conflict to add to the list above. If so, they are probably on default channel, so change to another.

Move the antenna around a bit on the router, make sure your pc has as short a distance from it as possible.

 

Good start, but Google will return many results for you. Have fun. I dont really secure mine, I am in an average neighborhood, have file and print sharing disabled, so really dont have any hassles.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/expert/bowman_03july28.mspx

 

I would start a new thread, you might not be noticed here. A quick quess would be to make sure your connected to it by default. Running internet connection wizard might help, but connecting *should* be simple.