reset wireless router at least once a day

Hi WTT, I don't know how to troubleshoot my wireless connection. I have a d-link wbr2310 and my wireless drops out at least once a day. I have one laptop running XP and one running vista, both have the connection problem. Things work fine on boot up. I have excellent signal for a while and then suddenly - connection lost. My desktop is wired to the router and that connection continues to work when the wireless stops. All I can do is unplug and restart the router, then wireless starts working again. It might last a couple hours, or maybe 20 minutes, or if I'm lucky, the whole day! But the next day brings more of the same. Initially I called d-link. they had me change some settings (beacon, RTS, fragment, long preamble) but nothing helped. I thought maybe there was something about that router, so I swapped it out with a netgear, but the same problems remain. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Hi gammaJ… I can't tell you specifically where or how to configure your different types of routers, but I can tell you what items to investigate. You can login to the router's web interface to adjust its settings. I'm sure you are familiar with that. The first thing to consider is the latest firmware. The latest firmware on wireless routers is pretty important for many reasons. Mainly for security and stability. Often times, that is all it takes to fix the problem. However, because it is happening the same with two routers, I would say you are having some type of interference problem. A device in your house may be interfering with your router. The way it works, you have 11 channels you can use in the US. Only channels 1, 6, and 11, never overlap. So, the idea is, use channel 1, channel 6, or channel 11. If it does not work change to another channel that is as far away as possible. It takes 5 channels of distance to keep from overlapping. So, if another device in your house is interfering you can try changing the channel away from what it is using now. I would also consider your encryption settings. Wireless encryption has always seemed to be fairly problematic for me and is quite frustrating. Sometimes those darn routers and wireless adapters just do not want to work right. I usually never use anything more than WPA-personal, with TKIP and PSK. In the extreme cases, I have had to resort to using WEP. It is such a problem, that I don't even deal with wireless security at my shop. I leave my wireless router wide open and could care less who accesses it. I need it to be reliable so I can quickly and easily connect to test laptops and such. Encryption just causes too many problems with such a wide variety of hardware. Newer routers, such as Wireless-N routers have many new settings to cause many new problems. I don't think you are using N so that is OK. Until we consider anything further, please update your router's firmware, and change the wireless channel and see how it works for you.