[wireless] No connection with centrino chipset

[magico]

After reading several user comments on the ASUS 500g I decided to buy one too. After unpacking and connecting the wires I had great difficulties establishing a wireless connection with my NEC P520 laptop (also known as the "TU/e" laptop). This laptop has a build in Intel Pro Wireless LAN 2100 3B mini pci card.

At home I have no problem connecting to my 3com office gateway wireless router, but the Asus just won't work. I followed Antiloop's guidelines for setting up the wireless connection, but with no result.

Using the program "Boingo" I managed to get a wireless connection of 5-10 seconds, but then it disappears again. The speed during that short online-time is very low.

The "wired" functions of the Asus work fine on my laptop and pc.

Has anyone had similar problems, or knows what to do? Could it be that my intel wireless card is incompatible? By the way, my asus router has the latest unmodded firmware.


Regards,

Magico!

[Royan]

I have a Dell 8600 with centrino as well. I think I have the same Intel Pro Wireless LAN 2100 3B mini pci card in my laptop.

When I first set up wireless networking from the asus router, I couldnt keep any connections either.

It turned out that windows xp wireless config and the Intel wireless config program that dell had installed were competing over which one should have control of the card.
Once I turned off the Intel program, most of my problems went away.

Since I set up the asus with "broadcast ssid" turned off, I got other problems. It turns out that the built-in windows xp wireless config has a tendency to drop connections to access points with "broadcast ssid" turned off, in favour og access points that broadcasts ssid. According to MS; "it's a feature" . Unfortunately, I live in an apartment building, and one of my neighbours has a wireless accesspoint with broadcast ssid turned on...

I sorta overcame that by turning up the signal strength from my router to 50mW. I don't know why it helps, but I don't have any lost connections anymore.

Don't know it any of this helps you, but it might give you some ideas to try.

I've been running Olegs 1.6.5.3-3 and 1.7.5.6-2 firmwares, and the signal strength has been set using nvram commands.

best of luck
Royan

Edit: Link.

[magico]

Thank you for your reply, unfortunatly I didn't help me out. Still I can't get my laptop to recognize the asus router. The laptop simply doesn't see the router at all! It looks like the wireless part of my router is broken or something?

Is it right that the laptop should at least see the router? Even if it's configured wrong? My laptop does see other wireless routers, like the 3com officeconnect.

[Antiloop]

not if it blocks broadcasting.. then your notebook would not be able to see the network

[magico]

not if it blocks broadcasting..

The router doesn't block broadcasting, that's why I don't get it, why is the router invisible for my laptop?

[Antiloop]

The router doesn't block broadcasting, that's why I don't get it, why is the router invisible for my laptop?

have you followed my howto already ? -exactly like described- ?

[max2950]

After reading several user comments on the ASUS 500g I decided to buy one too. After unpacking and connecting the wires I had great difficulties establishing a wireless connection with my NEC P520 laptop (also known as the "TU/e" laptop). This laptop has a build in Intel Pro Wireless LAN 2100 3B mini pci card.

At home I have no problem connecting to my 3com office gateway wireless router, but the Asus just won't work. I followed Antiloop's guidelines for setting up the wireless connection, but with no result.

Using the program "Boingo" I managed to get a wireless connection of 5-10 seconds, but then it disappears again. The speed during that short online-time is very low.

The "wired" functions of the Asus work fine on my laptop and pc.

Has anyone had similar problems, or knows what to do? Could it be that my intel wireless card is incompatible? By the way, my asus router has the latest unmodded firmware.


Regards,

Magico!

Hi !

I'm owning an Acer TravelMate 800 laptop, it also features the centrino chipset.
The laptop came with the same wireless card as your laptop. When i purchased my WL500g router i also struggled with the inability to have a wireless connection.
However my problem was a bit different, once i've had enabled WEP encryption i was not able to establish any connection any more... I tried to upgrade the routers firmware, the wlan card's driver, but nothing helped.
So i turned all encryption of on the router side...
Since running a wireless network without any encryption is not very secure, i decided to simply change the wireless card of my laptop for a Intel Wireless 2200BG. Now everything works fine, i have WEP encryption activated and stable wireless connections.
For information i'm using the drivers and intel utility that came with the 2200BG card...

Good Luck...

[Styno]

I happen to have the same laptop (Acer Travelmate 800) and I had also some struggles getting the Centrino chipset to work with the Asus router. Sometimes the connection just dropped after which it couldn't establish a connection anymore, sometimes it didn't see the AP but a connection was established anyway, etc.

I updated all drivers, tried several encryption options, and somehow, eventually it worked fine. So, it is possible to use the centrino chipset with the Asus router.

Note: There are problems with the "Wireless Zero Configuration" (a piece of MS sofware used in Windows XP to simplify wireless configuration) which causes a lot of problems like: no data exchange between pc and router while the connection (according to WinXP) is fine. When you have problems with wireless networks and are using Windows XP, try to disable wireless zero networking in Administrative Tools -> Services and use the software provided by the manufacturer of the wireless card.