The Wireless part is easy to check out -- your laptops will almost certainly have an ethernet/cat5 socket on them and you can get a cable for a few pounds from your local shop -- I've even seen cables in my local "pound shop". If you connect the laptop direct by cable into one of the spare ports on the linksys ( there are usually 4 ports, one of which may already be cabled to the PC you used to set up the router) you should be able to see if there is a significant difference.
how old is the xbox 360.......
Hi I also agree with HJ.....try plugging a cable in for a few days and see how you get on.....wifi can be problematical and can be subject to all sorts of interferance.....
Gary xx
dont start me off about virgin lol they are a bunch of ******* the service is terrible and customer service needs to be explained to them 12 days its taken them to sort out my problem for 6 months i told them dial up is quicker but they wouldnt have it
The Linksys range are fairly reliable -- perhaps the radio channel its using is subject to interference from somewhere, so it might be worth manually changing channels -- if you go into the linksys box as "admin" you can change channels off the wireless configuration page, but you will have to experiment to find out what works best for you locally. ( you will also have to reset the laptop parameters each time you change router channels too). Time-consuming task i'm afraid.
Sometimes a router firmware update can solve the connection problems.
Check the model number of your router then check to see it there is an updated firmware for it.
Follow the instructions to update it to the letter cos if you don't it could feck up your router.
Or I'm sure you could find someone in your area who could do it for you if you are a bit wary of updating it.
Contrary to some assertions Linksys have a myriad problems (they are the consumer arm of Cisco but don't pass on the superiority of that product unfortunately).
I have a Linksys wireless access point and it does this frequently whenever anything other than a Linksys access card accesses it. For example, just last week I was sorting out a PC for a friend that had a Belkin wireless network card and I had a bitch of a time getting the Belkin to see the Linsys even though they were only 8 feet apart. Sometimes it would show up sometimes it wouldn't.
There's not an awful lot you can do really, especially if you are connecting from any distance away. It could possibly be that a close neighbour is using one of the higher power wireless versions and it's swamping your signal. But similarly it could be caused by anything such as being close to a DECT phone base station, a microwave, a bluetooth appliance of some sort (it's because WiFi shares a similar wavelength to DECT and Bluetooth, i.e. ).
The other thing is that WiFi is not as reliable as a lot of people think, you'd be surprised how often they disconnect then reconnect repeatedly and as such is pretty useless for people wanting a permanent network connection whereby they transfer large files or is mission critical. It's next to useles for things other than web browsing and game playing where the data transferred is small data packets that are sent and received intermittantly.
Personally I'd recommend binning the Linksys and getting something like a Netgear. They're only about £30-£40 these days and are far superior to the Linsys crap. I recently gave the same advice to a mate of mine who had similar problems whereby his PC and his Xbox would connect, but his laptop wouldn't. He had a Linsys router. He swapped it out to a Netgear and everything connected.
The other thing to consider is what encryption standard you are using. For most people there is no reason to use anything above a 64 bit WEP key, anything higher and although security is increased so is the CPU demands on the router.
I've had a linksys for 4 years. No problems at all.
Try right-click on the wireless icon in the task bar and view the available networks. That will tell you what is out there. You may need to change the channel the laptop (etc) use to connect to the router, read the router docs.
Moving the laptop about should not affect the link to the internet, only the link from the router to the laptop....and not even that if short range. Check the strength (hover the cursor over the wireless icon) (mine shows 54mbps and excellent strength....range 15 metres) (it also shows my ex-wifes at low strength (range 100 metres)....she lives over the back from me.
I don't know if this is relevant - - -
My son has wireless on his PC upstairs at the back of the house. The router is at the front of the house downstairs. His connection kept dropping out, very frustrating when it dropped a download and had to be restarted from scratch.
We've always known the wall between the front and rear of the house carries a mild electric field (power cables too close to the metal mesh in the plaster.) And that was interfering with the signal.
The local PC shop offered a booster (£60) or a bigger aerial for the router (£7). We tried the aerial and it worked a treat.
Any electric field (microwave running etc) can interfere with a wireless signal (it's all the same stuff in the end) and if it drops below a certain level you will either lose the connection or not connect at all.
