Much Ado About Everything

If you recall, I had a lot of problems with my network about a month and a half ago.  Unfortunately, they didn’t really go away after that.  Well, they did work for a while, and then my laptop’s hard drive died!  I mentioned in the weblog that I considered doing reimaging.  Well, now I had to.

After completing reimaging, and reinstalling latest Centrino drivers from Intel, I eventually ran into major problems again.  Connection would drop frequently, and so would the router.  I was starting to get really pissed off as I wasn’t able to watch even a single episode of any anime when I get in bed (before going to sleep I often watch an episode or two on my laptop in bed).  Basically, there was no stability whatsoever, and often the network would drop every 10 minutes or so – and bringing it back would not always be trivial.

This was starting to really piss me off.  So I first decided to drop the WPA2 and switch to WEP just to test out if it’ll help.  It did – it was much more stable and didn’t reboot any longer.  But that’s no solution – WEP is almost as “good” as having the network unprotected.

So I decided to do something more radical.  If you recall, I used my Airport Express through its Ethernet port, meaning in wired mode only.  Now, I decided to disable wireless on my router completely and simply use the Airport Express as the wireless access point.  That actually worked!  Well, maybe I shouldn’t be so excited – it is supposed to work, after all.  However, it is getting so difficult to get any technology to just “work” these days that such a simple fact really is exciting.

Anyhow, not only AE worked well, but it allowed me to set it up in WPA2 mode!  If you recall, it wasn’t willing to act as the client to the D-Link 624C router
in WPA2 mode.  But it works well with Centrino laptop.  What does this mean?  Well, that D-Link 624C is nowhere near ready to be used in WPA2 mode
(the firmware was beta after all).  Also, it is not ready to be used even in WPA mode with newer firmwares.  Or newer Centrino drivers.  It seems if you want to use this router with a Centrino laptop – and that would be most of them – you should stick to super-old drivers and old firmware (2.42 was it?).  It will be reasonably stable.  Anything newer with either drivers or firmware or both – and you’re better off using wires to connect your laptop least you risk breaking it in half when pounding on it in frustration.

Even now the network isn’t all that stable.  Connectivity to Airport Express drops every few hours, though it seems to reconnect on its own in about half a minute.  Actually, it really isn’t very stable at all, but at least the recovery is much faster and doesn’t require doing anything, well, other than retrying your application.  In case of watching a video, it means closing and reopening the player.  So it’s still not good enough.  Perhaps WPA2 is too much, or my area is overcrowded with networks (which is true).