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Laptop Wireless Conflict
Musicman103
Posts: 2,238 Forum Member
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I have a Dell laptop running on a BT Home Hub. There is now a second laptop connected (HP Pavillion) laptop and the wireless connection on it has dropped. I reset the router (twice) but it made no difference. I reset the wireless adaptor and that made no difference. Diagnostics said it couldn't work out what the problem was. It just couldn't detect a wireless network.
So.....I switched off the Dell (which by this time had also lost its wireless signal). The HP then decided it could find a network and connected back in.
Any ideas? I thought routers assigned specific IP addresses, but it looks like they're fighting over the same one ?!
So.....I switched off the Dell (which by this time had also lost its wireless signal). The HP then decided it could find a network and connected back in.
Any ideas? I thought routers assigned specific IP addresses, but it looks like they're fighting over the same one ?!
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I had the exact same scenario between my laptop and phone. For whatever reason my router insisted on assigning the same IP address to both. It would happily assign different addresses to any other WiFi device but no matter which order I connected them, or any other device, the laptop and phone always had the same address.
In the end I connected the laptop on it's own so I could reliably identify it's MAC address and configured the router to reserve an IP address outside the DHCP pool for it. Problem solved. No more clash between laptop and phone.
I suspect you will have to do something similar to sort your problem out.
It's not an IP address conflict. If it was, the PC would detect a wireless network, and then it would tell you there's a conflict.
You need to be methodical. Turn everything off, then turn on the router. Once it has booted fully, start one PC, check its working, then start the other.
It was a really bizarre problem. No matter what I did on the laptop, phone or router the router always gave the two the same address using DHCP. But only my laptop and phone had the problem. Fire up my work laptop or phone and they got unique IP addresses.
I'll try those suggestions
There was about 10 identical laptops. Moving them further apart the problem vanished. In the end I ended up disabling the built in WiFi on those laptops and used a small USB WiFi adaptor instead that seemed far less susceptible to the problem. It's presumably very rare but it seems certain WiFi chipsets (older versions) can cause reception issues with other identical devices in the immediate vicinity. They seemed to saturate each other.
These laptops all had static IP addresses and didn't rely on DHCP. They all appeared to connect ok. But internet speed was pathetic (even though ample bandwidth was available) - until different WiFi adaptor used or moved further apart.
Never saw anything like it again.
Two different hubs, two different laptops, two different problems solved by the same answer. When BT accept there's a problem with them, that'll be a start.
After much diagnostic checking and getting nowhere I eventually found out the cause of the problem - Windows Update was offering an update to the wireless driver in the laptop and it was this updated driver that was the cause of the problem. I reinstalled the previous driver and the problem vanished.Reinstalled the newer driver - same problem again. So I again reinstalled the previous driver and the problem once again vanished. I assume that the updated driver had some sort of bug in it.
edit: I too have a BT HomeHub, HH5, so also had looked into that as being a problem but rolling back the wireless driver to a previous version did the trick.