A couple of weeks ago I decided to experiment with my home wireless set-up. Currently I am running a Netgear router that includes their RangeMax Next technology to provide draught n capabilities. Until now it has been set-up to broadcast the b/g compatible signal only. Since I was in my garden at the time and was receiving a weak signal, I decided to see what would happen if I switched the modem to output at full power, intended for the benefit of n capable devices of course.

The result surprised me a little as I actually received a stronger signal through my normal Wireless card built into the laptop. So this got me thinking, Summer is on the way and I plan to be in the garden as much as possible so… Off I went this weekend and bought a PC card to go with the modem. The NetGear WN511B coming in at £39 seemed the perfect choice given it is the partner card for the router and the price was almost £20 less than the other cards on show.

Installing the card was a breeze, following the usual run the CD first routine and once it had negotiated with the router performed the necessary handshake etc. I was able to get a blistering 200+ mbps over wireless Fantastic! All ran fine for a day then suddenly things started to go south. The wireless card refused to connect, no error no warning just nothing at all. It has taken me all of sunday evening and yesterday evening to finally nail the issue.

Of course I went through the pain of attempting an uninstall which was unbelievably crap. The installer wanted Cab2 which doesn’t exist on the HDD or on the damn CD so I gave it the jackboot treatment and deleted the driver and all installed files manually and used RegCrawler to blat the registry… at this point I had already dropped the laptop once carrying it from the office and wasn’t taking any prisoners.

So I downloaded the latest software and installed it without using the CD, during the download I noticed some release notes, apparently this version (the same as the one on the CD) fixed an issue where the card can’t connect to the router if it is set to run in a mixed security mode of WPA2 and WPA. This rang a bell as I run that mode due to having an older laptop at home that my wife uses, of course it can’t do WPA2 and the wireless card isn’t supported any more.

So once the card was re-installed I switched security mode to WPA2 only and reset the router. As soon as the router was back up the card connected fine and I got the superb speeds I got before. I then switched the router to WPA and reset again, and again the card connected fine. Finally I switched back to mixed mode and the card refused to connect.

So I am now stuck with WPA mode only until NetGear actually fix the issue, a shame as I do like to run the highest possible security I can, when I can, but at least for now I have a working wireless n set-up and can hopefully enjoy a great summer of catching up on my backlog of podcasts, shows and training that I have been lining up.

Tags: Connection Issues, Wireless N, WN511B

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 9:23 am and is filed under Personal News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.