Connectivity Issues with Netgear WGR614

Some additional information that hopefully will help in troublshooting:

My wife can connect to unsecure wireless signals in the neighborhood and connect to her work's VPN. Does this lead me down the path of (a) wireless security settings are not correct on laptop and/or router? or (b) Netgear router has a problem?

Thanks again.

The firmware needs an update. Some will dismiss this but it's part of the things I do to get wifi networks back and working. You don't want to know how many will ask Why? or Why did that fix it? For that I defer to the makers of these things. I will not dive into that but share that I have my protocol and work that.

Bob

Thanks Bob for your reply.

I did update the firmware last night with the latest version from the Netgear site. As part of this process, they had me erase all of the configuration settings so it would default back to the factory settings. I've read elsewhere where people have done a hard reset on the back of the router. I assume what I did (i.e. erase settings) serves the same purpose.

Any other thoughts?

All,

Just a quick update to closeout this problem. I troubleshooted the issue with my ISP tech support and we ended up targeting the router as the problem. At that point, I was so frustrated that the thought of a $40 new router fixing the problem elated me. So, I bought a new Linksys wireless-G router and everything is working great now.

I had a similar problem with a Netgear WGR624. Connection kept dropping and resuming every couple of minutes, with two laptops. One has a built-in Intel 2200BG wireless adapter, the other an AT&T cardbus adapter. I turned the router off and let it cool down, and then turned it back on, but it still kept losing the connection. Finally, I changed the wireless setting to "b only" instead of b/g, and it worked like a charm. B is good for 11 Mbps, and my DSL runs about 1.5 Mbps, so I don't see a performance hit. I checked out some youtube videos to test the streaming speed, and didn't hit any bottlenecks. Granted, the range is probably diminished to some extent, but it hasn't affected me. My max distance is about 25 feet, and the signal strength at that distance is still excellent. Hopefully this helps somebody else with the same problem.