Router issues involving my PC & Kindle Fire HD

Factual Questions
1

Sorry for the sucky title, but I kept coming up blank on a concise way to explain this.

Some years ago I got a Kindle Fire as a gift (they were just on the market, so probably about 3 years ago?). At the time I only had a DSL modem, since I didn’t have any wireless devices (at least, not that I’d be using at home). But now, with the Kindle, I needed that option if I wanted to download books et al. easily.

So I upgraded my modem to a wireless router. Once I did, I noticed that I now had a little icon at the bottom right of my PC’s Win7 taskbar: the standard five-bar pseudo-graph denoting connection strength. I activated my Kindle, plugged in the WEP key, and Og saw that it was good. Well, until about a year later when for some reason the Kindle would no longer charge its battery. (Since I really wasn’t using it that much anyway, I never got it replaced.)

Flash forward. I’m not sure exactly when this happened, but maybe about a year ago, I noticed that the five-bar icon at the bottom right of my PC taskbar had changed to an outline of a square with a little prong at the end. Curious, I looked at my Network & Connections options and noticed that apparently my PC was using a LAN wired connection. Now the icon made sense: it was simulating a wire and outlet. Well, I had no idea why or exactly when this changed, as I didn’t recall doing any reconnecting or readjusting of my wireless/connectivity settings to warrant this switch. Everything seemed to work the same, so I shrugged and went on with life.

Flash forward again to last week, when I finally gave in and bought myself a new Kindle Fire HD. Now the problems began. I went through the process of setting up the device, it located my router ID, I plugged in the correct WEP key (although it keeps asking for “password,” I know what they mean is the WEP ID). The Kindle refused my advances and insisted that I had the wrong password. This happened over and over again.

After many attempts at turning the router off and on, and logging in to my router’s IP address via my desktop, suddenly–and damnit, I don’t remember what I did–my PC had the five-bar icon again. Now Kindle recognized my router. Halleujah!

…Except my desktop internet was unbelievably slow. Crazy, hellishly slow. And it would only speed up if I turned off and on again. The Kindle also kept losing connectivity. As last night I happened to want to watch Netflix (Orange is the New Black, yay!), the slowness of my connection caused tons of pauses while the streaming buffered. This drove me to distraction and finally I went into my Network Connections option and chose the LAN connection again. “Zoom” went my internet speed, but “Bye-Bye” went my Kindle.

Okay this has been a long enough epic. My questions are:

  1. Why would my connection have changed from the wireless to the wired LAN without my having done anything? (Why did the icon change seemingly overnight?) Or must I have amnesia and I actually did do something but just didn’t realize it at the time?

  2. Why does my PC’s connectivity affect my Kindle finding my router? Aren’t they two different devices? Why can’t the Kindle use the router wirelessly, while the PC is connected via LAN? I mean, it’s not as if I’m using a laptop; my PC is always got the Ethernet cable attached to the router.

  3. There does seem to be a common problem with Kindle Fire HDs and router connections, at least according to Google searches. Many similar help requests on different message boards end up with answers that suggest buying a new router. Does it sound as if this is a router issue to you guys?

FWIW, my router is a Westell 7500, my ISP is Verizon, and my hair is brown w/caramel highlights. No, the last one doesn’t really matter, but I bet the other two don’t either. I’ll probably call Verizon while I wait for an answer but I suspect they’ll tell me it’s a Kindle problem, and vice versa. Any help you guys can provide would be awesome. Thank you!

2

I can’t answer all of it but:

You have more than one password. The wireless password is what you use to connect. If it doesn’t work, check the bottom of the router if it was the default. Aside: are you sure it was WEP, and not WPA(2). WEP passwords must consist of 0-9 and/or A-F. It’s a rather dated and less secure technology. WPA you can type in a normal password with the rest of the alphabet or special characters.

Now, if that doesn’t work you can try going to the router settings. Go on your browser to 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 usually. If it asks for a password, try yours there. If you didn’t change the password, it is probably:
Login: admin
Password: password
All lowercase. I found those by googling “Westell 7500 default password”. Poke around in the settings there to see/change the wireless password. If your locked out of there, you might have to reset the router by poking a paperclip in the hole in the back, but that will reset all your settings.

  1. They are treated mostly the same AFAIK except that wired connections are faster. I wonder if one is sucking up all the bandwidth. In the router settings (the 192… stuff) you can maybe balance it better. Also you might want to assign IP addresses for the devices (e.g. 192.168.x.1 or .x.100, whatever) and make the IPs static. Sometimes a new device can swipe your IP, which can be harmless but maybe not. You can also see if anyone else is on your connection, if there’s that remote possibility.

LAN doesn’t refer to how it is connected. Both wired and wireless are on there.

  1. No problem with my Fire HD and DSL. I see you have Verizon, is that the same service as AT&Ts? Maybe that’s why your connection is so shitty (no, this is not based on my current personal experience :mad:).

You could do what I did: buy a router from a brick & mortar store, and return it if the problem persists, and thus the problem isn’t your router (I kept it as it was).

ETA: and WEP is also minimum 10 characters. WPA doesn’t have that restriction.

3

Hi and thanks!

I doubt anyone could! Jeez I’m wordy.

(Snipped some stuff) Thanks! That part I know and have tried. My router is definitely set to the WEP protocol (or whatever you’d call it–vs. WPA or WPA2), and that 10-digit code is what I’m supposed to enter, rather than my ISP/DSL account username/password–at least that’s what most people who’ve had this problem have realized (they were using their account PW and discovered that despite the language on the Kindle’s screen, it’s not the password, it’s the security key).

I do see that WEP is outdated and Kindle Fire HDs do support the WPA(2) and WPA options, as does my router. Maybe I’ll give that a try. Actually by some amazing coincidence, my brother-in-law asked me just last week if I have any use for a new router since he has an extra one. So if swapping the WEP to WPA(2) doesn’t work, I’ll give the different router a try.

Oops, gotcha. Oy, networks, wifi and so on are beyond my brain capacity to understand. I swear, I’m actually quite technologically literate, but only up to a point. I know a lot about what I know–I understand web hosting and running/tweaking programs and so on–but beyond that I get easily overwhelmed. Not even super-complicated stuff, y’know? Like… smartphones, for example. They intimidate the crap out of me. And I’ve been working with computers for 30 years! Ridiculous. I feel as if my mind is a sponge that’s soaked up all the technology it can, and now it’s incapable of soaking up any more.

Anyway, enough angsting. Re: the possibility that one device is sucking up more bandwidth from the other, maybe I can test that by keeping my Kindle off, switching my PC to wireless, and see how fast things go? I even tried to run a speed test when this happened the other night, but I couldn’t… the test timed out! That’s nuts, even considering I don’t have a very fast DSL line at all (only 1mbps downloading–I’m restricted because I have what they call a ‘dry line’–I don’t have landline service so Verizon caps my DSL speed, presumably out of spite).

Heh, no, Verizon is different from AT&T, but it’s sucky. I’m considering switching to a cable connection instead of DSL, although I know there are pros and cons there.

Thanks very much for your help, thelurkinghorror. I’ll try some of those experiments and see how it goes.

4

I’ve had several different wireless routers and what I see in my notification area is sometimes different depending on their software.

Normally (for what that’s worth) you’ll only see the wireless strength bars if your PC is using a wireless connection. If you’re hard wired to the router, the Local Area Connection icon or a Network icon is what you would expect to see.

You’re right in that the status of your PC connection shouldn’t have any effect on the ability of the Kindle to connect wirelessly to the router.

If it were me, I’d trouble shoot by using my phone’s wifi ability to look at available networks and then make sure it can see and connect to the network.

The Kindle is using SSID to “see” the network, so double check the router is set for “Enable SSID Broadcast” or something along those lines.

FWIW, this sounds more like a router setup issue than a Windoze issue. It almost sounds like the router is shutting off the wifi when the hard wire is being used, but I’ve never seen that as any sort of option on any of my routers.

5

Thanks, Ornery Bob. For someone ornery you seem rather helpful.

Good point about the SSID network–I’ll double-check that.

Hmm. This is interesting. Before I got this email, and shortly after replying to thelurkinghorror, I deleted some old VPNs I had cluttering up my Network Connections area, and was going to switch from the wired to my wireless connection. The strange thing was that I noticed that I had two wireless options showing up: one using my ASUS 802.11n adapter and another using Microsoft’s Virtual WiFi Miniport adapter.

Last week when I had these issues, I know the ASUS adapter wasn’t available, so I’d picked the Microsoft Virtual WiFi. It had been so long since I used wireless that I couldn’t remember whether there was supposed to be something else, although I’d thought I had a wireless adapter included in my system build.

Anyway, after selecting the ASUS, I turned the router off, kept it off for a good ten minutes, and turned it back on. After my computer adjusted itself, I had the little five bars icon in my tray again, and better yet, my speed is really good. Unusually good, I might even say. I tested streaming video and no problems whatsoever.

Here’s the super-interesting part. I turned on my Kindle and without doing a thing, I saw that the wireless connection was on! No logging in, it’s just… working. Downloaded a test file and everything.

Not that I wanna jinx it or anything, but what the heck? Firstly, why couldn’t Windows find my ASUS adapter last week but could this week, and could using that instead of Microsoft’s Virtual WiFi thingy make such a difference?

For now I’m just happy everything seems to be working, but I hate not understanding why. Because without understanding, that means I have no control over making sure it doesn’t screw up (or rather, that I don’t screw up) again.