Two wireless Dell's - 1 connects one doesn't

[FlameOut]

I ran into a problem that for the life of me can't figure out what is going on. My sister-in-law has a wireless setup at her house (Verizon DLS with the Verizon supplied Westell Versilink router/modem)

I have a Dell laptop with internal Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG, hers is a Dell with the internal Dell Wireless 1370 WLAN Mini-PCI Card.

Both machines running Win XP Pro. I have no problems at all connecting to her router with my laptop. I try with hers, and it just wont connect (The router shows up under 'view available wireless networks'

I try to connect and it goes through the usual "please wait while windows connect to ... etc"

There are actually 2 available wireless networks in the area. I won't connect to either. Actually when I try to connect to her, it will try for about 10 seconds then I get a popup saying "Windows is unable to connect to the selected network. The network may no longer be in range. Please refresh the list of available networks, and try to connect again"

I'm sitting about two feet from the router and signal streanght isn't the problem.

Any idea what I might be able to try next?

[Sterling_Aug]

Dell was known for a bad driver. We had tons of problems at work until we tried a different wireless driver.

[G Ray88]

Check your Wireless Zero Configuration, Right click on My Computer>manage>services and applications>in the right panel double click Services. Scroll to the bottom of the screen click on Wireless Zero Configuration, when you do that then look at the top left of the same panel you should see Stop the service, Restart the service. Try clicking on Restart the service.
I was having the same problem you were describing in your post, a tech person at Bellsouth walked me thought the above. The computer that I was working on show that the service was already started, tried restarting the service and it worked just an idea. Good Luck :)

[cat5e]

May be this can Help, http://www.ezlan.net/wireless.html

:D

[rmanet]

Dell was known for a bad driver. We had tons of problems at work until we tried a different wireless driver.


Hey Sterling - same issue here - what driver did you find and use?

[strat440]

I saw this post when I was trying to figure out the same problem on my laptop, and figured I would answer it now that I got the solution from Dell tech support. Apparently some of Verizon's Westell wireless routers don't recognize some of Dell's new wireless cards. All you need to do is run an upgrade file on a computer that is connected to the router with a cable. I didn't write down the exact URL for the exe.file that Dell tech support gave me, but you can either get it by calling them, or I found a website that seems to give a page from which you can get that file:

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?c=us&cs=19&docid=125CFDEB0AFE10E1E0401E0A55174E79&journalid=FD3654B2E69611DAA153699FAA04079A&l=en&s=dhs%23en

Hope this helps anyone who is as frustrated as I was an hour ago!

[Sterling_Aug]

rmanet: We used an older Dell driver (can't remember which version).