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Is there anyway to increase signal strength? Like an antennae I can buy for my laptop or wrap it in tinfoil?

Wrapping it in tinfoil will kill signal strength. Buy a better base station or try directional antennas.

It really depends on how your manufacturer sets your wireless adapter. Dell keeps the antennae next to the card, meaning if you open the miniPCI slot you'd see the card w/ antennae sticking out, while IBM builds special antennae right smack next to the monitor, and lets them relay signals to the miniPCI.

i dunno... but im interested on why i have a "low" signal strength less than 20 feet from the router...



I think its cos my house is fairly old and not made out of shite materials

Or there's some real bad interference going on somewhere...

What wireless type do you have? If you have A, then that's probably why (shortest range of all the Wi-Fi's, and easily disrupted).

hmm... 802.11g according to my Routers manual. however i don't know what that means.

Weird, that's supposed to be the longest range and least interfering of all of them (since it uses 5GHz)...

I'd chalk it up to bad router, or bad wireless card then.

i have B cards, which i thought was odd when pc world sold them to my dad... would that have something to do with it?

edit: -
Routers a belkin one.

so you're using 802.11b wireless cards with an 802.11g router? yeah. . .get new cards that are on the g standard. it's likely the discrepancy between the two causing your problems.

bugger it. Not my fault I didn't buy the cards!

This'll teach my dad to go over my head.

802.11b is compatible with 802.11g routers so that shouldn't be the problem. What you should really do is return the router and go with a different brand 802.11g router (Netgear, Linksys, Buffalo are all good) and give that a try. Before you do that though, try switching your current router to a different channel to see if that clears up the interference.

I played around with the settings and it turns out theres another wireless network within range using the same Channel as me. so i changed channel and im getting a better signal now. Thanks kernel

Yeah, as I thought before...really bad interference.

I live in the city and may be moving to a skyscraper soon (currently in a suburban-type apartment building). What do I do if there are 10+ wireless networks surrounding me?

GoldenFalcon wrote:Yeah, as I thought before...really bad interference.

I live in the city and may be moving to a skyscraper soon (currently in a suburban-type apartment building). What do I do if there are 10+ wireless networks surrounding me?

There are usually enough channels in a wireless router to get around any interference, you'll just need to play around with it for a while to get the one that works best for you.

Buy a Mac with their internal antennae running along the screen

Or get one of those external wireless antennaes...

Praxis wrote:Buy a Mac with their internal antennae running along the screen

My Compaq has one of those too, and it has about twice the range of the PCMCIA models.

Zac Naloen wrote:I think its cos my house is fairly old and not made out of shite materials

My relatively new townhouse is shit... you have nails sticking up through the stair carpet...

Praxis wrote:Buy a Mac with their internal antennae running along the screen

Or get one of those external wireless antennaes...

IBM does that too, even includes a Bluetooth antenna. Really cool stuff.