Laptop wireless testing

[Brenten]

I have a person's laptop on my desk right now, it's a Dell Latitude D610 with built in wireless. The user complains every month or so that the wireless won't work right and/or keeps dropping it's connection all the time.

When I have it on my desk it seems to work fine. Can anyone think of a good way to troubleshoot this problem? I'm trying to find some software that I can use to analyze it's wireless connections, something that will tell me signal strength and whatnot over a period of time, say a few hours.

Ideally said software will monitor the wireless connection and provide me with some real data that I show this person that the laptop is NOT the issue (they have a home wireless and like to go to places like Panera Breads and coffee shops). Any help would be great. Thanks!

-Brenten

[Ob1]

how many times is the wireless connection dropping out in a given day? what wireless standard are they using A, B, or G?

the A - standard is on the 5ghz regulated frequency which can help reduce/prevent interference that disrupts the wireless signal that would cause a wireless NIC to drop its connection. The downside is that it has shorter range (250ft) then wireless B, G standard (300ft)

B, G - are on the 2.ghz unregulated frequency which is more crowded and more suspectible to wireless interference caused by cordeless phones and micowaves to name a few. you can try switching channels on the wireless router to see if that helps.

Unfortunately this is where the whole Wireless technology falls short. Everybody experiences signal drop off/disconnection when on wireless its just the way it is.

does your client experience this problem when he is at home? ask if he has any cordless phones?

have you updated the wireless nic driver?

try putting in a pcmcia wireless network card in the laptop and see if anything improves.

[glc]

Are you using WinXP SP2 and the builtin Windows zero configuration utility, or are you using the Dell card management utility?

[Brenten]

Hi folks, thanks for the replies. It appears to be user-based, not PC-based. Windows is managing the wireless network. I tried the wireless here (at work), at Panera's during lunch, and at a 3rd site and it performed flawlessly in all 3 places.

Going to try to 'educate' the user on this one, sorry for wasting your time. I'm still trying to find a nice little network utility that could show the end user a visual graph or chart of the wireless connection staying connected for, say, hours at a time...

[glc]

Go update the firmware on their wireless access point, do a hard reset on it, and reconfigure it.