A regular customer rings to say his wireless has stopped working again…

In the past, its usually due to his son altering the wireless security settings.

Once there, I see he has 2 wireless laptops and a wireless PC. Of which none are able to connect to the wireless router.

I have a quick look at one PC, and it just doesn’t see any wireless.

I fix that by power cycling the wireless router.

Next, I take a look at an ibm laptop (it has both internal wireless (802.11B) and an external USB wireless (802.11G))… and I quickly see that the ibm wireless software is over-riding the functioning of the usb 802.11G dongle. Easily fixed by pressing Fn-F5 to disable the internal wireless.

The third laptop is tricky… everything looks like it should work… but it detects no wireless networks… sometimes it detects a “HP share” network. I had setup wireless on this PC over a year ago, so I know it should work. I try everything I can think of, but eventually decide that the wireless circuit must have developed a fault.

Customer is happy to use an ethernet cable, as the laptop spends most of its life about 2 meters from the router.