Don’t use a wireless USB adapter if you don’t need to
A customer couldn’t get his laptop to work over his wireless internet, and he was getting windows error messages. He thinks XP needs to be reinstalled.
When I get there, I see he is trying to use a netgear wireless USB adapter (which looks a bit worse for wear).
A glance at his laptop, and I see its an intel centrino, with built-in wireless, so I decide to not use the netgear adapter.
He doesn’t know his WEP security settings, so I decide to connect the PC directly to the modem/wireless router (I forget the brand), and setup WPA-PSK
I pluging the ethernet cable, but I can’t seem to connect to the router.
I check DHCP and IP settings, but there is nothing wrong.
I do ipconfig release and renew, but it doesn’t get a new DHCP address.
While I explain the strange situation to the customer, the PC finally sees the router. The internet works well, and I setup the wireless settings appropriately.
I restart the router, and again, it takes many minutes for the router to talk to the PC.
But once connected, everything is fine.
Well, there are no real showstoppers, as this only happens when the router is restarted, so I leave another happy customer.
I’ve seen a fair few clients who have a centrino laptop and still use a USB wireless adaptor. When I tell them that it’s already built in, the look on their face is that of shock, because the guy up at the local computer shop sold them a wireless adaptor (probably) knowing full well it’s not needed.