My wireless network drops about every few hours. Otherwise, the computer reports I have excellent signal strength. I cannot figure out why it does it. I disabled wireless zero configuration. I installed the linksys wireless client utility to manage the wifi network. Did not help. Tried to change the channel. All power-saving functions are disabled (even in device manager for the wnic). I talked to a network engineer at my work that is a wireless god and he said to disable the B & G support and make it only G support because the two will "fight" and could cause a drop. I disabled the B support. Did not help. I am running service pack 2 on my home computer, in case that makes a difference. I've litterally changed out all of my networking equipment. I replaced my wap11 with a wrt54g. Did not help. I added the range expander. Helped the signal strength (before that, I did not have excellent strength, but after I definitely did.) The range expander did not help. Still drops every few hours. I replaced the range expander with a linksys 54g access point and have the router and access point bridged. Still drops every few hours. I have the latest firmware on both the router and access point. I replaced my wireless NIC in my desktop from a wusb11 linksys nic to the pci 54 Mb version of the linksys wireless nic. Same results. So I doubt it is the equipment because I have replaced everything 10 times over. Now, we do have a phone that runs at 2.4 GHz. But this problem has been going on ever since we bought the wireless network, which was before we bought the phone. And the phone explicitly says it is "wireless network friendly" on the packaging. (It's an AT&T phone so I hope they knew what they were talking about.) But it's been happening before we bought the phone anyway, so if it what is causing the problem now, it wasn't what was causing the problem when we first installed the network. Our phone prior was a 900 MHz phone. We live in the middle of no where. Our nearest neighbor is about a quarter mile away so there is no chance of having neighboring wireless networks causing interference. I am completely out of ideas why it drops randomly (about every few hours).

Intriguing problem. What other services are running on the computer? Any software loaded in or before the OS, like miniport drivers, chipset specific stuff for the mobo? Any recurring tasks set up in the OS or as a service, like indexing, virus scan, etc? Have you tried disabling all background tasks and getting as close to zero-state as possible --> (only running explorer.exe and as little else as possible?) Try to reduce op's to this state, then observe over time. If no dropouts are seen, add back normal stuff, item at a time, and observe op's till one is found that brings undesirable behavior.

Yes, this is the excessive approach, but it does seem to disturb you to that degree. Query: after your connection is dropped, does it automatically reconnect? If so, what is the problem, do you gain routing issues between multiple networks or something like that that needs to be corrected by hand?

If it does not reconnect automatically, almost instantly, then that is an issue that needs addressing all by itself!

Good luck,

/ts

What is the status report from your ISP? They could easily be dropping the signal that infrequently.

the phone and the wi-fi signal are using the same frequency, 2.4 ghz. Get either a 900 mhz or a 5 ghz phone.
Also, I have read that microwave ovens and bluetooth enabled devices can affect the performance of a wireless network.

It isn't my ISP dropping. My signal reports it's dropping in windows. It is my wireless connection.