Have had a TR2 now for 6 months and my husband takes it travelling with him. He has been totally unable to make the wifi stay up for more than a couple of minutes when away from our own network.

On the home network it sometimes drops (on battery and on mains and I have turned off the wifi power saving) but often works for quite a while. On paid, or other secure, networks it keeps dropping off. By the time it comes back and you get signed on it generally drops off again!

This is impossible to troubleshoot when it is 5,000 miles away.

My local geek thinks that it is due to frequency wandering when the machine gets hot…......how do I prove this one way or another? I need to get it sorted before the warranty runs out or my husband throws it through a hotel window!

The other “big” problem is the inability of this particular machine to produce a popup screen when you “View all available networks”. Press the button and NOTHING happens. Tech support have been unwilling, or unable, to tell me if this is a “feature” of the particular model or if my XP has a glitch. The machine has been reloaded from rescue disks with no improvement. I have just had the machine running next to a friend’s, bigger, Vaio - which shows the desired screen and allows connection to the network selected. Grrrrr. Is this screen an XP thing or a feature of the wifi driver?

I am now reduced to running a PCMCIA wifi card to see if the connection problems will go away. So far it seems better - the machine will be travelling next week for a better test.

Any suggestions that do not require a network engineer’s level of understanding to troubleshoot or implement?

Did you upgrade to windows xp service pack 2?

I didn’t upgrade it myself - how do I tell if it has been done?

I’m not used to XP….... :?

hold alt and double click on my computer and it’ll tell you what service pack you have

Alt/doubleclick on the desktop does nothing at all…......

OK - finally found something that says I have 5.1.2600 Service Pack 1

How do I get SP2?

goto windowsupdate.microsoft.com. After it scans your computer, it will give the option of installing SP2.

SP2 must be installed separate from all other updates.

try sp2..check for any potential 802.11 interferences or try a different channel. 

OK - finally got SP2 installed. I’ll have to wait a while to see if the actual wifi connection stays up.

I still don’t have anything with “View Available Wireless Networks”. Going in through the “Network Connections” screen, Right-click “Wireless Network Connection” and select “View Available Wireless Networks” gives me nothing.

Selecting “Properties” I now get a slightly different screen to the SP1 version…..under the “Wireless Networks” tab there is a button for viewing networks where there used to be a list. Click the button and I get NOTHING. This is worse than before.

Please can somebody tell me if this is right? How do I connect to a new network?

I have seen another (Different, bigger) Vaio that puts up a popup screen with a list of Wifi networks being received in these conditions and allows you to pick which one to connect to. Since I have two access points here I could swap between them - if I had this option, which I don’t.

... if your wifi is only for b networks and you are working in areas where there may be other g networks not running in protection mode….

11g Protection Mode
Ensures that your wireless router does not interfere with neighbor networks. 802.11b networks cannot hear 802.11g networks, but 802.11g networks can hear 802.11b networks. 802.11g networks cause collisions on 802.11b networks so the Protection Mode forces the 802.11g network to negotiate around the 802.11b network.

so if networks are not running in protection mode then that could be one contributing factor… although it sounds like there are other issues.  It will be interesting to hear what you have to say after sp2…

What I have to say after SP2 is not repeatable in a public forum!

I have now rebuilt from the Sony recovery disks….............I tried the network first, before installing anything at all. It works. As it should. The screen that was missing before is now there. One problem solved.

So I need to send the machine travelling before installing any other programs. Maybe whatever stomped on the popup had stomped on something else as well…..

As for the network stuff, David Ziff - I don’t have a clue what you mean! The TR2MP has (allegedly) a g wifi builtin. My office has g access points. The connection is only 11 Mbps on the builtin but goes to 22 Mbps with a D-link card. Makes no sense to me.

I would download a copy of norton internet security professional…

Norton Internet Security â„¢ 2004 Professional FREE trialware

from here:

http://nct.digitalriver.com/0001/

do a scan on your computer?  something is going on and it sounds like it involves your op sys and not the hardware.

In the end i recomend ordering a disk and doing a clean install and starting from scratch.  Then install the window updates and the vaio updats.  Then add security software like the one mentioned above….
but do a scan with the trial ware above and if it finds anything then that is a likely source to some of your problems…

good luck

Thanks David…....Norton Internet Security came with the machine and hasn’t flagged any problems.

I have a feeling that Outlook98 may have been responsible for trashing some XP modules - it installs with IE4 on a desktop (no way to do it on its own) and the network facilities are not available with XP. Thank You, Uncle Bill!

I have now installed a couple of small, independant, bits of software - testing wifi at each stage - and it’s all still working. But the builtin is still at half the speed of the PCMCIA card. Irritating but not terminal.

Thanks to all for the help.

OK, last night i was using the internet and had my cpu fan set all the way low… That is the default setting when running off the battery.

All of my apps were totally slow and i was like what the f@%$!  I realized that i had been running some other aps in the back ground like a scan and such and even once i killed everything the cpy usage was all speratice and taxing.  I finally realized i had the fan on low and it was killing everything.

Go to All Programs—> performance balancer—> performance balancer

I use this all the time and it is necessary with this laptop.  Try setting the cpu fan to max under customize when on the battery and see if that helps.  The default setting is low

anything that is ‘98 I would not use as they do not offer support for x’98 anymore…. and there are sure to be conflicts with XPspx op sys…

good luck

Well, I’ve installed most of the stuff that was there before…...one prog at a time with a regression test between each.

The only difference was with Outlook98 - this time I installed the standalone version instead of the “corporate and workgroup” version. I didn’t even attempt to install any of the network facilities. I still have everything working as I expected it to; I can display the wifi networks in range and switch from one to another.

I can only assume that Outlook had installed an old version of a dll file (or more than one) that was causing the problems. I have always known that Microsoft followed pretty slack software practices but this one even surprised me. One MS product trashes another…....

Thanks for the suggestions and help, guys.

what about signal interfering from other devices. for ex, 2.4 Ghz wirless phone, microwave , etc