Mainframeguy

Well...... for one reason and another we had to enable WEP (yeah I know slackers and insecure people that we are )...

Thing is since then my old eMachines M5116 notebook has basically been offline... at first it could connect intermitently, although the Network Status lied....

I booted into Ubuntu by the way and got that WEPed like a dream and it stays online solid as a rock with Ndiswrapped BCMWL5.sys driver files.

The chipset in there is pretty common, the Broadcom BCM4306 for 511b/g at Rev.03. I have so far been through the (originally working) R81433 driver set from Dell (their Truemobile 1300 carries same chipset) and then tried Dells R58092 set , then also found mention of a Belkin set and tried that F5d7010-V2.4.5.UK all to no avail. Tried with authentication on and off.... no joy. Open and shared - no joy.... I have read from google of issues people are having on the NDISWRAPPER side but, as I say, that works like a dream for me - my problems are purely with XP.

Anyone out there using same chipset and have latest dirvers or a link to them? This has become tiresome to me and I could use a hand....

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Admiral Michael

I know my friend's broadcom (not sure if the same model) has a Broadcom management app. He doesn't use Windows to manage wifi.

I have an Intel wifi card (POS if I may add) and the reason I'm mentioning it is that I wasn't able to connect (or sustain a connection if I remember correctly) by using the Windows Wireless Manager I had to use the Intel app.

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Mainframeguy

yeah - that figures I read a few posts (maybe some in here) that talk about turning off the Xp service - only problem is now I have Belkin drivers on tyhere and not even sure they are working! anyway - I'll experiment with that - thanks.... this is onboard wifi in the machine - it is just what eMachines specced and actually I am happy enough with it... in other respects!

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Admiral Michael

Both mine and my friend's are onboard, well actually integrated since it's a miniPCI card. I upgraded to the Intel for the G mode but I didnt know it was a crap card when I bought it. Aw well, the Intel app is nice.

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Mainframeguy

thought I should post back on this one - since I resolved it - the only trouble is I have no clue HOW it was resolved.... what happened was I went through those two drivers as listed and changing various settings - with neither of the driver updates did I get connectivity beyond detection of networks... then at one point I end up with no drivers and driver install for the original drivers will not find the device

So here I go back to a restore point before I changed drivers - and suddenyl all is well again. The only thing I actually changed was the display of the notification icon on the task bar (had turned it off an had to turn it on again). Oh and I guess I did stop and start the Zwindows service for network management.

There is something in the taskbar icon though, because before when there were problems it would show no network present, even when there was.

I hate probems like this - that get resolved without awareness of the action to resolve. Still have to move on and forget it - just be grateful I have a notebook online!

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Admiral Michael

That's odd. I hate when that happens.

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