I have offered to help my brother-in-law with a problem at his small office. His story is that he bought a wireless hub to connect three PCs to each other and to a DSL modem - two via wireless connections and one with a short ethernet cable. It seems that the wired connection doesn’t work at all, and the wireless ones are very slow.
He isn’t the world’s savviest computer user. He told me that the hub was built by “Netscape”, but I got him to agree that it might actually be Netgear. It may well be some simple connection mistake, though I could not offhand think of any simple suggestions for him to try.
I was wondering if any Dopers might know what could cause these symptoms, and what would be worth checking. I apologize for the rather vague statement of the problem.
Make sure for the wired connection he is using a proper patch cable, and not a cross-over cable. Is he even getting an IP address on the wired connection? He should get the wired connection working before even looking at wireless.
How slow is very slow? What kind of signal strength is he getting? Is he using WEP or WPA encryption?
Are you sure he’s even accessing his network? If his router or wireless card is not set up properly he could be tapping into someone elses unprotected wireless network, which could explain the low speed. For example, when I first installed my wireless card in my laptop at home, it immediately connected to a neighbor’s network. Further inspection showed that there were six improperly configured networks within range of my 40 dollar wireless card.
Me, too- my laptop occasionally forgets which network is mine and hooks up to one of the five nearby ones. Most are secured, encrypted, etc., so they don’t actually do anything for me except refuse my connection.
The other ones, though, are on 24/7 and fully open. Their signals are very weak and fluctuate constantly, so it’s fairly easy to tell when I’m on the wrong one.
After considerable fooling around, I found the basic sources of the problem, one straightforward, one obscure:
There was a lot of line noise, apparently associated with a fax machine that shared the line with the DSL modem. Disconnecting the fax machine from the line made things somewhat better, but left the fundamental “super slow” problem intact.
The router was made by Linksys. A call to their tech support line eventually produced the suggestion to alter the default setting for maximum packet length. (!) Changing this from “Auto” to a maximum of 1400 bytes immediately solved the problem.