Odd CPU behavior on 2 diff wireless cards

[silvrrwulf]

Greetings, all! I have a delimma that's beyond me at this point. There's an 800 mhz athlon that has a Dlink USB (241?) pen drive-style wireless net card. The system boots up and connects to the Mircrosoft wireless router, and all's well. After 5-10 minutes, the icon crosses out and it says "wireless network not avalible." :eek:

So, I tried a different net work card, this time a Linksys wap11 version 2.6 (usb). Same results. Also - it seems if you click on windows explorer, the system can't read the drives (it hangs on the "My computer" icon). So I did what computer geeks do - format.

It wasn't 5 minutes into my fresh windows that I had the same problem - and this was with a different hard drive altogether. I've tried updating to IE 6.1, but I only have a little while before the update fails due to the loss of the network. I have managed an incremental patch of XP Pro, however, so we're up to date on all that.

What I'm stuck with now is the possibility that the primary IDE controller MAY be going out, but that's all I can think of. I'm posting here b/c you experts would know if there was some weird incompatibility with microsoft's router and wither of those two wireless cards. The base system (hard-wired) continues to connect fine. If you have any ideas, I'd really appricate it. Thanks again for your time!!!!! :)

~SilverWulf

[EricB]

Before running through the following 2 checklists, are you able to ping the machines. (ipconfig /all) If so, I doubt if there's a real hardware problem.

1) http://forums.practicallynetworked.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=833 A complete checklist, to make sure your file and printer setting are ol.
2) http://practicallynetworked.com/sharing/ A complete guide through the internet sharing issue.

Make sure you download the right firmware / drivers for both nic's. You might want to check if you have WPA update installed from ms. This causes the same problem as described when you hardware is not complaint.