Getting Wireless to Work on a WNR3500
I recently installed a new router, the NetGear WNR3500 which was a nice upgrade over the old router: namely Wireless N and Gigabit networking for plugged-in connections. It’s been wonderful on my work computer, which supports Gigabit and Wireless-N.
The one problem is that the wireless doesn’t work very well for some computers. My work-issued laptop was fine, and our printer seems fine, but the other laptop, a 4 year old Dell Inspiron 6000, was disconnecting every 2 or 3 minutes. Judging by this forum, and the comments on Amazon, there’s a real cargo cult developing around the WNR3500’s wireless problems. There are myriad suggestions out there: update firmware, update the driver, change to a different channel, downgrade the max speed to 145Mbps, or to 56Mbps, change power management settings… or return it to the store for a refund. The last was tempting, but I’m too hard-headed to give up.
I did arrive at a solution after much experimentation:
- Update the router to the latest firmware. NetGear makes this easy, and in fact nags you to do it when you log in to the router’s web interface. This didn’t change anything.
- Change the channel. Looking on the Dell-supplied Radio utility, I could see that in my neighborhood, there’s around 2 dozen wireless signals visible from my living room, and almost half of them are on channel 6. I picked channel 11. Interesting side note: there’s really only 3 channels you can reliably use in the US.
- Changing the channel seemed to help some, but the laptop was still disconnecting. At this point, I started really scouring the available forums and realized that nobody really knows what’s wrong with the WNR3500, and the only possibilities seemed to be either to update the laptop’s wireless driver or buy a whole new card. The latter option has the advantage of getting Wireless-N speeds, but costs a fair bit of money. Luckily, Dell makes driver updates pretty easy if you have your Service Tag Number. The main frustration was that I couldn’t stay connected long enough to download the driver, so I gave up and plugged the laptop into the router directly (possibly the first time that laptop’s hardwired connection’s ever been used).
I’m happy to report that after these steps, the wireless problems are over and the laptop now stays connected to the WNR3500 pretty well.
— Gordon Weakliem
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