Wireless woe

[Phil_Stein]

So just a couple days ago I got a nice new IBM T41 laptop, with Centrino wireless. Hooked up a Netgear wireless router (added it to my existing network, which has a good solid cable internet connection that is always quite reliable). I enabled 40 bit WEP encryption so the black helicopters hovering over my house can't get anything on me.

So it all basically works, EXCEPT...

When I'm browsing the web, when I click on a link or open a site or whatever, about 20-40% of the time, the browser basically just sits there. The little loading bar at the bottom of the browser (I.E.) progresses slowly, but never (or very rarely) gets all the way to the end. If I press the stop button at the top of the browser window and then do an immediate refresh, often the page will then load more or less instantaneously (occasionally it's still hung). Again, this problem overall only happens maybe 20-40% of the time, but it's real annoying. Doesn't happen at all with my wired desktop. I played very briefly with Mozilla rather than I.E., and it seemed to have the same problem.

My theory is that it's dropping a small number of packets - say 1% or so (versus perhaps 0.0001% with the wired connection), and that when it hits a dropped packet, it sits around waiting forever for the resend. That's just a wild-assed guess though. I looked through Windows property settings for something that would let me control error handling/packet loss and modify the parameters, but I couldn't find anything.

It should also be noted that this IBM laptop has various proprietary IBM software loaded, much of it apparently aimed at extra data and wireless security, and perhaps some of that is mucking it up, but it seems a bit of a longshot.

So, any ideas out there?

[Case]

So, any ideas out there?

What's your signal strength?

I discovered my house has very odd reflections and dead spots, so I had to add a couple of repeaters around the place to get reliable wireless coverage.

[Phil_Stein]

I'm getting good to excellent reception, according to the icon in my system tray.

[Bull]

I think the proprietary software is your most fruitful avenue for troubleshooting. Dropped packets are basically a transport protocol issue, which is going to work the same across wired and wireless networks and you're only experiencing this on the wireless node.