WLAN disconnects

[ladams]

I have a Vaio PCG-R600HFPD. Wireless LAN has always worked fine for the last couple of years, now (and no settings have changed either on Wireless gateway or on laptop) it keeps disconnecting after about two minutes. I am at my wit's end as nothing has changed since last week and I cannot work out what has gone wrong. I have reconfigured the gateway and it works fine - my desktop is hardwired to it and I have no problem connecting to the internet there, but the laptop is quickly turning into a piece of junk as I cannot keep a connection going.

I have no idea if this has been posted before as I couldn't find your "Search" facility.

[TygerTyger]

Well something must have changed even if it's apparantly unrelated. Have you installed any software/drivers/sp2 around the time just before it happened? Had any strange power surges that may have done something odd to ur router? Bought a cordless phone? Hardwiring is fairly simple to get going, wireless unfortunately has many more things that could have gone wrong.

[ladams]

No, nothing has changed and nothing new has been installed. I am holding off installing SP2 until I know the full repercussions. I live in Asia and my ISP had a problem last Thursday when two of the main fibre optic cables that have connectoin to the US went down, but that was all back to normal on Saturday. My ISP confirmed this. But even though my ADSL speed is now back to normal (it was very slow from Thursday to Saturday) the wireless is still playing up. The Wireless router is fine - it is connecting fine and all the LED's are lit. The WLAN hardware in the VAIO is fine - but it still keeps disconnecting every couple of minutes or so. This evening it kept up the connection for about 20 minutes - the longest time for five days but then dropped it again - now the maximum connection time has reverted to approx two minutes.

[TygerTyger]

Create a system restore point, backup the registry and then install SP2. It really is far better for wireless networks and may solve your problem if you get lucky. If all goes wrong you can always uninstall/roll back your computer.;

[ladams]

I have now upgraded to SP2 and am afraid that nothing has changed. I think the problem is with my ISP as I have upgraded the firmware of the router and it is fine, the driver of both of the wireless cards are fine - I have two wireless computers and one wired and both the wireless ones are exhibiting exactly the same symptons. So I have now passed the buck to my ISP saying I will find another provided unless they can stabilise my connection speed (which is I think where the problem lies) as everything was OK until the fibre optic cable went down last week - and even though they say it is fixed I don't think it really is.

Thanks for your help anyway

[TygerTyger]

Good luck with that. You might want to check that they still allow more than one user to use the broadband service at one time, it may be that they have changed their policy and are simply disconnecting you somehow when you are using two computers at once. Long shot, but you never know.

[RichardCudmore]

I had a similar problem using Belkin and INEXQ wireless cards. Look for a check box in your wireless card utility 'Enable IEEE802.1x Authentication for this network' and uncheck it. I know you say nothing has changed but you know how clever these machines are getting these days. They have minds of their own particularly when it comes to networking! Hope this helps.

[Jacko]

I'm sure I had something like this about a year ago when I first got my PCG-R600HFPD - the WiFi icon kept popping up in System Tray and 'losing' the WLAN, then finding it, then losing it again a few minutes later.

I cannot remember EXACTLY what I did, but it's worked fine for me since I made some changes... I don't know WHICH one did the job, but here's what I tried:

Make sure you have the latest version of the WLAN card driver from the SONY Vaio-Link website (I have Wireless LAN Driver version 7.16.0.189 installed)

Download the latest WiFi networking update from www.windowsupdate.com (it wasn't in the 'critical' section, it was in the optional updates section, not in the hardware-drivers section).

Turn off IEEE 802.1x Authentication on the Windows WiFi Networking dialog on the VAIO - unless you're running a proper Windows Domain (ie, not just peer-to-peer 'Workgroups), I don't think this has any function anyway!

Experiment connecting with and without WEP enabled - I originally found no problems unless I used WEP & Authentication - after following the next step, it seemed to stop causing them...

Ensure that you MANUALLY enter a hexadecimal WEP key on both ends (ie, the VAIO and my WAP), rather than using 'automatic passphrase' generation. I'm not convinced that software from different manufacturers doesn't generate 'different' WEP keys from the same ASCII input, but I may be way off line here.

Since then, everything worked fine, bar one problem which was later solver by Belkin... when transferring huge media files (MP3's, AVI's etc) across the WLAN link to my VAIO, the VAIO would lose the connection and complain about 'Write Errors', and drop the movie/song playback, and require a power-cycle of the WAP! I contacted Belkin about this and they gave me a newer (non-public) version of the Firmware for my F5D6130 WiFi WAP, which cured the problem.

Now all I need is to find out whether my VAIO's internal ORiNOCO card can handle WPA encryption instead of WEP (because WEP can be cracked) - If anyone can help me here, I'd be grateful (the SONY Vaio-Link support notes don't seem to mention it, or I can't find it!)

[Jacko]

[continued from previous post - sorry, but the forum barfed.... I know it's long but it IS quite relevant, imho]

And one final 'heads-up' - if you DO manage to get this going, make sure you take the following four steps to increase the security of your WLAN - you do NOT want people randomly joining it and using your network/installing trojans/wiping files/etc...

1. Make sure your WAP/Gateway is NOT using the default SSID (Belkin54g/MyWLAN/Netgear/etc) - change it to something private, but which doesn't identify where your WLAN hotspot might be (ie - NOT '32HighStreet' or 'JohnSmithWLAN' - use something non-descript like 'TheMatrix' or 'PrivateWLAN' as the SSID.

2. Tell your WAP/Gateway NOT to broadcast its SSID, and tell your VAIO explicitly what SSID to connect to. This will stop other people with their laptops set to use 'ANY' SSID from 'seeing' your WLAN.

3. Implement WEP using the 128bit/104bit strength key. WEP may not be perfect, but using the strongest key will mean that any attempted hacker will have to capture more packets for decryption - which might put him off taking the time, and get him to try somewhere else. And that's assuming he even knows you've got a WLAN! If you implement steps 1 & 2, there's a good chance he won't even notice you're there (unless he is using a radio-scanner to hunt the 2.4gHz radio band and record packet-data for cracking, which is pretty advanced!!)

4. Implement MAC-address filtering on your WAP, telling your WAP exactly which MAC addresses to allow to associate to your WLAN. You can find the MAC address of your VAIO in the Network Connection's Status tab (from the icon in the system-tray). This will stop anyone else's WiFi card from being allowed to talk to your WAP. Sure, they can change the MAC address on their laptop, but they have many thousands (perhaps millions) of combinations to try before they find MAC addresses that your WAP will trust.

Then grab a copy of Netstumbler (www.netstumbler.com) and check that you cannot use it to 'see' your WLAN. And while you're at it, see how many other WLANs in your neighbourhood are wide-open and unencrypted! Feel great (but DON'T join their WLANs or you may be breaking the law!)

The VAIO R600HFPD is a GREAT bit of kit, and the problem you're having can be cured, imho.

My only concern is that because the WiFi card is in-built, and seems to only support WEP, not WPA, it may become outdated unless SONY can do something to include WPA support in the driver! Belkin (bless them) have offered to upgrade my F5D6130 WAP to a newer 7130 54g one that DOES support WPA - and I'm keen to take them up on the offer (even though I know the VAIO won't support 54g, the Belkin should still talk '11mbps' 802b as before) - but there doesn't seem much point if I cannot get my VAIO to talk WPA too!

Any clues out there from the hardcore VAIO guys? TIA