I'm on an eMachines desktop with a Hawking Laboratories Hi-Gain USB Wireless-G Dish Adapter to connect to my family's wireless connection. I also have a Gateway laptop with a wi-fi card installed. Problem is, my wi-fi connection on my desktop will randomly crash, and then attempt to connect to the router again. If it does, it says that it has "Limited or no connectivity". When I go to disconnect and then re-connect, the WEP key has arbitrarily changed to an 8-digit code (of course it's security locked with little dots, so I can't see what it is). This happens at random intervals, but never stays online without crashing for more than an hour. All the proper drivers are installed, but I'm using Windows rather than the provided program from the router company to control the connection. I've read that some people have this happen when using Vista, and the computer the router is connected to runs Vista. ANY help would be appreciated. I'm at the end of my wits here with this thing.

Just because the password is only showing 8 dots doesn't necessarily mean that the password has changed - some systems just have a default like that, however many characters are actually hidden behind. First thing I'd try is to change the channel that your wifi is using, there may be a neighbour nearby who's using the same channel & kicking you off - it's probably set to 'auto' so try setting it to an actual number & see if that cures it. "I've always been mad, I know I've been mad, like the most of us..."

It seems like after it does that weird crash thing, it just resets the WEP to something else, because our key has more characters. I know there's five computers set up on the network, and our family key is private and locked, so nobody else can get to it, unless they hacked it. One computer is off and on, and another is broken, so there's about 3-4 computers logged on at any one time. I'm not quite sure how to change the channel on the Wi-Fi. Will it change it for just my computer, or for the whole network?