Wireless Network Strangeness

[mitchell1981]

I was wondering if anyone could shed any light on a strange problem we are having.

 

Most of our wireless network consists of Netgear WG602v2 access points. These have been very unreliable so I've started to replace them with HP Procurve 420 access points. So far I have replaced two.

 

Most of our laptops work fine with this arrangement. However, we have a number of older laptops which use netgear wireless PCMCIA cards (WG511) to connect to the network. For some reason they always want to connect to the new HP Procurve access points, even when they are in another building!

 

This screenshot shows the situation quite well. The highlighted access point is the one in the same room which has a strong signal, yet the card chooses to ignore it and connect to the Procurve access point (A4-BD).

 

http://www.mascalls.kent.sch.uk/wifi.jpg

 

If the new access points are switched off then the laptops connect to the strongest signal again, as they are supposed to do!

 

Anyone got any ideas? The HP Procurve 420 has a lot of settings that I don't understand, but I think I've got it set up correctly.

[SYNACK]

Have you tried using the Windows Wireless Zero Configuration system to manage the WiFi instead as I have always found this to be much more stable, reliable and predictable than anything that the vendors put out. Just speculation but I'm assuming that the cards have the European drivers and firmware as channel 12 is outside the legal broadcast range in some other countries and so the drivers could be leaving it as a last resort.

[mitchell1981]

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try changing the channels and see what happens.

 

We are using Zero configuration, but switched to the netgear software just to see what it was doing.