Various wifi issues

Fenika said:

Why can't netbooks do anything right?

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Because cheap hardware is cheap.

My xp netbook and my mother's 7 netbook (both Toshibas) hate connecting to different home wifi networks even though other computers are connected. Moving them doesnt help. They either say limited or no connectivity or they never connect and give up after three to four minutes. Rebooting doesnt help except sometimes it will randomly catch.

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If the other computers work fine, and you're not aware of any differences in network settings between them and the netbooks, my guess is the chips in the netbooks just isn't very good.

In addition neither netbook nor my iphone like to connect to my moms network. My iphone will connect for a few minutes or seconds every few hours but go right back to 3g.

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What generation iPhone? Do you know what kind of network it is? WEP, WPA or WPA2? 802.11g or 802.11n? 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz? And what kind of router?

Fenika said:

Cheap hardware is very cheap.

Iphone 4, running the latest os.

Wifi is Wpa enabled... Umm. Cisco wireless g router 802.11g. And the Dell is connected at 54mbps. Where do i find the ghz??

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If it's 802.11g, it's 2.4 GHz. Hmm. I can't think of what may be the problem with the iPhone. Is this a recent development, or has it always happened, and do you have problems anywhere else?

You may try going to Settings->General->Reset->Reset Network Settings. It'll restart and you'll have to re-enter WiFi
passwords, but everything else on the phone will be preserved as-is. I've had to do it a couple times when some settings presumably got corrupted. It may or may not work for you, but it's worth a try.

And for both the iPhone and netbooks, there's always the ol' restart-the-router shuffle to try. Have you done that?

ETA: Oh, and is the problem that you can't even see the networks? Or that you can see them, but trying to connect to them fails?

Fenika said:

We did the restarting shuffle last week when I was home. I can try again, though it baffles me that the netbooks have so many issues.

And the networks are visable and you can click on them no problem. Getting the actual connnection is a crap shoot.

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Well, it's a step better than my mother's netbook, where whether it even saw the network was a crapshoot.

Hi, Fenika. Two possibilities:

1 :: Do you live in a built up area? If there's lots of wireless networks around, they can interfere with each others' signals. I use iStumbler to check out the local networks and what channels they're using, but it's a Mac programme. I believe inSSIDer does the same thing for PC.

If your network is sharing a channel with several other networks, try changing your network's channel to something less popular and see if that helps the problem. You should be able to do that by browsing to the router's IP address on a connected computer. If you're not sure what your router's IP address is, two common ones are 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.2.1.

2 :: Otherwise, I'm wondering if the problem isn't the various computers and phones, but the router itself. I can stand in my driveway and connect to my router with my iPhone, and the router is two floors up and at the other end of the building. My router isn't anything special, either; it's a Belkin modem/router that I bought about six years ago.

Can you borrow another router from a friend and see if that makes a difference?

Cheers.