Help! My wireless network is lying to me!

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2004-11-17 01:54pm

I live in an on-campus apartment, so instead of getting my own router, I just piggyback on someone else's. That's been all well and good, except that there is one and only one router that works. The others are unencrypted, but when I connect to them, there's no connection to the net. So I switched the other routers to "On Demand" instead of "Automatic", thinking that would fix the problem, but now 90% of the time it says it's connected to the good one, when it actually connected to one that doesn't work (I can tell by the IP address it assigns). Or it will be connected to the good one and then "jump ship" to one that doesn't work.

Is there any way to get Windows to know who it's sticking its dick into and force it to be monogamous, or maybe there's a program that handles network connection better than the default SP2 handling?

My adapter is a Netgear MA311 802.11b. Running Service Pack 2.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2004-11-17 02:08pm

Set windows to NOT connect to networks that aren't on its list, and put the good router on the list. I don't run a wireless network at home, so I'm a shade fuzzy on exact procedure, but that should work.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2004-11-17 02:24pm

White Haven wrote:Set windows to NOT connect to networks that aren't on its list, and put the good router on the list. I don't run a wireless network at home, so I'm a shade fuzzy on exact procedure, but that should work.

That problem is that it connects to them anyway, even if I tell it not to. It will connect to the wrong one and tell me it's connected to the good one.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2004-11-17 02:49pm

That's bloody odd. That kinda crap is why I /do not touch/ wireless. You can't accidentally connect to the wrong 10/100 switch, yaknow?