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Moved into my gf's parent's place 2 years ago and I've been using wi-fi since and it's been bad times since. Filled with frustration and cursing over poor signals, connection loss and piss poor through-put. Wi-fi is my only option since I don't think her parents want me drilling a hole through their wall and running an ethernet cable out to the rec-room. After a while I got tired of the poor connection and wasted my money on a couple different antennas which only made the signal worse. They were semi-directional and directional. This was going through two walls and possibly the roof. Then I ditched that idea and bought a 3 meter extension cable for the antenna that hooks up to my PCI wireless network card. Moved the antenna outside on the roof and the signal went from like 15% to 90+% which was awesome but the noise level went sky high from almost nothing. Fine with me since it worked much better. This worked for over a year and then 2 or 3 moths back one day the signal strength dropped to between 15-25% and it's been that way ever since. Only time it goes higher is if it's below freezing outside.

It randomly quits working. Much more lately since the signal strength tanked. When this happens I usually go inside the house and turn off the modem for a few seconds and turn it back on. That usually works but not always.

I'm using a wireless G router. Linksys wireless router - Linksys WRT54G/GS/GL. Running tomato firmware which I put on it right away out of the box and it worked great for over a year.

I noticed that when my internet goes out I can still get wireless internet out here on my iPod and my PS3. And even turning off the modem or router on and off didn't fix my PC internet it still works on the PS3 and the iPod touch! WTF does that mean?

I'm running windows 7 64bit. When I try to type in ipconfig in RUN it pops up a window for a split second and disappears so I can't even get my network info. I think it's an IP problem. Seems like my PC can't get assigned an IP and can't access the network and that's why it usually fixes the problem when I restart the router or modem because it assigns a new IP. But I don't know much about networking.

Any ideas why my signal went to hell all of the sudden out of the blue? Would it help to get a wireless N type router?

You may want to try looking at the dd-wrt firmware. I believe it has some features for modifying signal stregnth of the wireless setup.

However, if your other devices still have connection and your PC doesn't, chances are your problem is with the computer not the router. Check the drivers for the wireless NIC first, see if there are updated drivers. A shot in the dark is that since extending the antena, the "driver" powering the antena on the card may have lost some of its juice.

Regarding ipconfig. Type cmd first and that should bring up a command prompt where you can type ipconfig /all to get all the ip info. Once in the command prompt try pinging the router's IP address and see if the packets are dropping.

I don't know about your other WIFI problems, but I did get a Wireless-N router almost 2 years ago, and it has been fantastic! Only connection problems is when my (rented) modem dies, which happens 1-2 times a year, like on this past Christmas!

My desktop's wireless-N card has 3 antenna connectors, which I have an external unit with 3 short antennas on it. So now my desktop is getting signals from up and down the street, where it only got my router and the next door neighbors before. Since my old router was on the other side of the house, I was having signal problems too - 1-2 bars with my wireless-G pci card.

Another thing I noticed is the transfer speed between my laptop and desktop over the wifi is improved. It doesn't "feel" as fast as a hardwired connection, but it's way faster than wireless-G.

I paid $60 for the router and $40 for the PCI card, both on craigslist, so in my mind it was worth it over my old flakey setup (a wrt54g!).

I've already gone through the settings on the firmware that I was familiar with and I boosted the signal a little bit at a time until I got the best signal. At a certain point the signal actually gets a lot worse so you can't just put it on full blast.

The extension idea about the card not having enough juice sounds legit except for the fact that it's been on there for a very long time and worked great up until recently when the signal went to shit. Which also probably rules out firmware issues and drivers.

The level of incovenience has changed drastically. Pay phones used to charge $.10, then there was sticky stuff on the receiver, or on the floor in the booth and you tracked it onto the floor mat in your car, some punk had ripped out the page you needed in the yellow pages, then your dime got jammed and you had to find another phone booth. So, enjoy your wi-fi.

lol when you're a PC gamer it's difficult to enjoy wi-fi.

Ever wonder what that nasty old-milk looking smears on the glass were, too? Imagine the worst and you'll be right. Get into an old phone booth with a bulky jacket and after you'd be glowing under UV like a Chernobyl deer.

Can you run an ethernet along the baseboards? I imagine it wouldn't be over 300'.

Only way it's getting out of the house and to this building is through a hole in the wall and I doubt they want me to put a hole in their wall. I'm hoping to move out this summer so I plan to just stick it out for a while longer. Would be nice to be able to figure out what happened to make it so much worse lately though.

Maybe your wifi adapter is about to die or your router for that matter. We had an adapter that almost died before Christmas and it only killed upload (went to about a 1/1000 of normal rate), download worked fine. Changing hardware and everything went back to normal.

Hmm, interesting. I wonder what it would cost to go to wireless N.