AE Base station issues.....

[skinnylegs]

I have an Airport Extreme Base Station (802.11n) and for the most part it works great. My iBook, X Box 360 and Apple TV are able to connect to the wireless network and seldom, if ever, do I lose that connection.

My PC, on the other hand, is another story. I have a Linksys 802.11g USB Wireless Network Adapter and for whatever reason, I lose my connection to the wireless network every 5-10 minutes and the *only* way to get my connection back is to reboot the computer. When the connection goes down, my wireless network shows up but it only gets to "Acquiring Network Address" but nothing beyond that.

I have already tried reinstalling drivers for the wireless network card and I have tried plugging said card into another USB outlet but no luck with either. I also dl'd and installed the firmware update for the AE but no luck with this either.

Any suggestions?

 

[mkrishnan]

You might try increasing the DHCP lease on the router settings. Otherwise...

A few more details, please... security config (WPA1/2? Hidden SSID? MAC filter?) of the router, operating system on the PC (Vista or XP?)?

 

[skinnylegs]

You might try increasing the DHCP lease on the router settings. Otherwise...

I'm a bit of a nOOb when it comes to networking. How do I do this?

I don't have any security on the router and the PC is running XP sp2 with all of the updates. Is there any other info. I can provide you that might be helpful?

Thanks!

 

[skinnylegs]

BTW and for whatever it's worth......the problem started precisely when I upgraded to the AE router. I used to have a Linksys router and I never had a problem. The only reason I got the new router was because it was 802.11g really work with my Apple TV.

 

[mkrishnan]

Okay, let's see... I have the old 802.11g AEBS, so this might not be 100% the same. But I open up the Airport Admin Utility and then open my router. Then, under the Network tab, I have it set up like this:

[EDIT^2 - I left the image on my desktop, and now, finally, I seem to be able to upload it]

You should have similar settings -- in particular, you should be distributing IP addresses, sharing a single IP address (can either be 10.0.1.1 or 192.168.1.1 -- doesn't matter). See the DHCP lease box? That's where this is set. It tells how long a computer can own an IP address on the intranet. Set the timeframe to days and then put in a generous number, like the 14 I have.

So that's part 1.

Part 2, you need to make sure that your XP computer is not trying to grab a specific IP address. This is a very common cause of problems, especially if it grabs a low number. If the XP computer is set up to be, say, 10.0.1.3, and the router doesn't realize that, then it will try to give 10.0.1.3 away to someone else. When it does, it will start rejecting the XP computer from the network.

Unfortunately I am not an XP wiz, and I'm not sure how to do this. I think you follow something basically like these directions.