Hello, I recently setup a wireless network in my house. The router is a Linksys 802.11b, and I used a cable modem for my connection. The network currently has two clients; one desktop with a compatible Linksys PCI adapter and one laptop (Dell Latitude D800) with a built-in Intel PROSet adapter. Both PCs run Windows XP Professional. To make the network secure, I changed the default login password (from the default: linksys), I changed the default SSID, I setup 128-bit WEP, and I setup MAC filtering. So far, the desktop has run perfectly with the wireless network, but unfortunately, the laptop has not. In the middle of surfing the internet, suddenly my internet connection was lost. I rechecked TCP/IP, router, and PROset adapter configurations, and everything was fine. All the settings were correct. However, for some reason the connection could simply not be reestablished. I opened up cmd.exe and ran a ipconfig /all, and under Wireless Network Connection, it said, "Media State......: Media disconnected." I tried disabling and reenabling the network connection and reconfiguring the adapter and TCP/IP settings, but this problem wouldn't go away. Eventually, I used the Reset button on my Linksys router to resetup the whole network, and this worked, but it was very time consuming. After setting up the network exactly how it was before, I began using the internet on my laptop again. About thirty minutes later, the same thing happened, only this time it happend upon rebooting (I believe this is a coincidence, but I could be wrong). Although I could continue to resetup my wireless network each time this happens, it happens so frequently that this process would become very annoying (it already has, in fact). I have a feeling that this problem results from a hardware compatibility problem between the Intel PROset wireless adapter and the Linksys router, but it's only a feeling. Does anyone have any suggestions as to where this problem is coming from? Any help, information, or links leading to the solution would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

The desktop is plugged directly into the router with a regular cat5 cable, right? If so, the entire problem is the wireless connection between the laptop and the router. If it were an incompatable hardware situation you wouldn't get a connection to lose. A couple of things you could try would be to change the router and the wireless NIC in your laptop to a different channel,(Not different from each other), just different from what they are on now. 802.11b runs on 2.4 ghz the same as cordless phones etc. and you may have a conflict with a neighbor's phone or baby moniter. You could also try not using the WEP and see if the connection gets better. Another thing to try would be to use static ip addresses. Disable the DHCP server on the LAN side of the router and assign static ip,subnet masks, gateway and DNS servers to the tcp/ip properties of the NICs.