AAGGH ,Please help with ad-hoc connection

[fidzer]

Help please someone, i'm going insane with this. I have installed a D-link air plus etreme g wireless pci card in to my desktop in the hope that I could get it to talk to my recently aquired laptop which has built in wi fi .
My laptop has a Creatix ctx712 wireless lan pci card in it .
The D-link is a 802.11g card but the box and instructions say it is backwards compatible with 802.11b, which the Creatix card is.
Both card use their own software for setting up the connection, the desktop uses D-link extreme g configuration software and the laptop uses prism wirelass lan software.
I've set the ssid up exactly the same on both computers, put them both on the same channel, made sure they use ip addresses in the same range and set the subnet mask up identical on both. 192.168.0.2 and 192.168.0.3 and subnet mask 255.255.255.0
They are both set to adhoc mode and wep is turned off on both.
Looking at the status software they both say ascociated but the strings are different.
Both cards software say the are transmitting but not receiving anything.
The curious thing is that on the status screen for both the link quality and strength indicators are greyed out?
Is it too much to expect these cards to be able to communicate or should i just buy the dlink card for my laptop and hope that sorts it out.
Thabks to anyone who takes the time to look at this.

[ragman]

I had exactly the same problem as you. I had an existing wireless laptop with a Linksys wireless card and purchased a new Toshiba laptop with built in wireless. I setup the IP addresses exactly the same as yourself (192.168.0.x). Both were trying to send, but couldn't receive. I managed to work out what I was doing wrong.

I wanted to get both PCs to talk to each other (ad-hoc mode), so I could transfer all my data from the old laptop to the new laptop.

On my old laptop I had a profile setup as the default linksys setup. The network ID was "linksys". On my new laptop I had to setup a new profile and get it to connect to any existing network, or a specific network. I told my new profile to connect to the "linksys" profile. The profile settings should be sitting on your wireless software on your new laptop. I hit the apply button and bang, they both started talking to each other.

The reason this profile system is in effect, is that you could use your laptop to connect to many different networks. If you're at work, you can get swtich to a work profile, or if you are at home, you can switch over to a home network. Within each profile, you setup the IP addresses etc. Setting the IP address of the wireless card will not automatically let it work with your home network.

Also make sure your new laptop doesn't have an on/off swtich located somewhere which turns the wireless card on and off. I know mine has and didn't know it was there, until the software told me.

Hope it helps.

[fidzer]

Thanks for your assistance ragman. This was driving me insane for over a week, scoured the laptop user manual wireless section to no avail, phoned the tech support line, told him i was having probs and before i'd finished my sentence he told me the model of my laptop and to press Alt and F2 to turn on wireless networking. This immediately turned on the little blue light at the bottom of the screen and i had a connection to my desktop in minutes.
Amazing. Looked back through the user manual and one little sentence tells you that the combination is required, but no where near the wireless section.
But hey, lesson learned and if this helps anyone else out then all the better.