Dropouts with US Robotics router & pcmcia (in win2k)

Just purchased a US Robotics 54/100mbps wireless router & access point plus
a US Robotics PCMCIA card for my Thinkpad T23 running under Windows 2000.
Works great, but every 10 minutes or so I have a 3/5 second dropout. Any way
to fix it?

Some more info:
I've got one wireless connection (to my laptop) and one wired
connection (to my desktop) running from this router. (The WAN-connection
goes to my cable modem.) The wired connection does not get interrupted, so
I'm
quite sure I am unable to ping the router from my laptop during dropouts.

What happens is that the US Robotics icon in the Windows-tray, which is
normally green (100% signal & connection strength!), suddenly goes yellow
(stands
for 'roaming'), and the 'Network cable disconnected' icon appears in the
tray.
Then, without doing anything, 3 seconds later or so, the connection is
restored, and the
USR icon turns green again. I've been playing with the settings a bit
(lowering the encryption strength, changing access mode (normally set to
'continuous access mode', but I'm not sure what this does), changing
channels, etc.), but nothing helps...

The impression I get is that the connection is reset every couple of
minutes. I think that
when copying a couple of gigabytes from my laptop to my desktop over the
wireless, dropouts
do not occur (i.e. I can just let it copy and when I return after a couple
of minutes, it'll be done perfectly).

In article <YzbTb.2446$(E-Mail Removed)>,
Slashed Zero <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> Works great, but every 10 minutes or so I have a 3/5 second dropout. Any way
> to fix it?

My router (USR 8054) occasionally reboots. This disconnects IM and VPN
sessions, and the IM ones reconnect automatically, but does not bother SMB
and SSH sessions. It seems to happen more frequently when I'm typing over
an SSH session (as in when I've SSHed from my laptop to my desktop, and am
replying to a news article). These reboots also happened spontaneously, as
if somebody on the net was maliciously sending some kind of
specially-crafted packet. These reboots seem a lot less frequent since I
flashed 1.21 (bug USR tech support, I guess).

> Some more info:
> I've got one wireless connection (to my laptop) and one wired connection
> (to my desktop) running from this router. (The WAN-connection goes to my
> cable modem.) The wired connection does not get interrupted, so I'm
> quite sure I am unable to ping the router from my laptop during dropouts.

From your desktop, Shirley? Or are you saying that the wireless connection
stays up, and the wireless connection reboots (that is not wahat I got from
paragraph above)?

> What happens is that the US Robotics icon in the Windows-tray, which is
> normally green (100% signal & connection strength!), suddenly goes yellow
> (stands for 'roaming'), and the 'Network cable disconnected' icon appears
> in the tray.
> Then, without doing anything, 3 seconds later or so, the connection is
> restored, and the USR icon turns green again.

The only Windows machine I have is my XP laptop (wireless connection), and
it exhibits similar symptoms.

> I think that when copying a couple of gigabytes from my laptop to my
> desktop over the wireless, dropouts do not occur

IME, SMB transparently handles dropouts.

--
-eben (E-Mail Removed)m home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar
"God does not play dice" -- Einstein
"Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws
them where they can't be seen." -- Stephen Hawking

> > Some more info:
> > I've got one wireless connection (to my laptop) and one wired connection
> > (to my desktop) running from this router. (The WAN-connection goes to
my
> > cable modem.) The wired connection does not get interrupted, so I'm
> > quite sure I am unable to ping the router from my laptop during
dropouts.
>
> From your desktop, Shirley? Or are you saying that the wireless
connection
> stays up, and the wireless connection reboots (that is not wahat I got
from
> paragraph above)?
>
Nope, I'm just saying that it's the wireless connection itself that goes
out, not my WAN-connection. (Someone in another newsgroup asked me whether I
was sure if my cable modem wasn't causing the dropouts.)

Thanks for the other info though!

> specially-crafted packet. These reboots seem a lot less frequent since I
> flashed 1.21 (bug USR tech support, I guess).

Could you please e-mail me that firmware update
(slashed_removethiscrapincludingtheunderscores_zer (E-Mail Removed))? The latest
I'm able to find on USR website is 1.17.