why does the home hub lose my laptop?

[Two_Sheds]

I used the laptop in bed this morning, as per.

Then brought it downstairs, and it lost its connection. It took me half an hour to get it going again, using various tricks I've had to learn, including restarting the home hub, which is only 5 feet away from the laptop.

today the problem was "invalid IP address"

Anyone know why it loses its connection just by coming down the stairs?

It does this intermittently. It used to be every day, and now it's once in a while.

very irritating though.

[HotStuff]

A few questions TS:

You say Home Hub, does that mean you're with BT?

Does you laptop have wireless built in or are you using a card or dongle?

What operating system are you using on your laptop?

Do you know if your laptop has a fixed IP address, or is it assigned by your Home Hub?

Do you know if your neighbours have wireless networks?

Is your Home Hub near any electrical equipment, such as a fridge?

[OllieMartin]

I had a similar problem and it turned out to be the channel I was using. A neighbour was using the same channel and they were interfering.

[Two_Sheds]

You say Home Hub, does that mean you're with BT?

Thanks for answering. Yes, BT

Does you laptop have wireless built in or are you using a card or dongle?

built in

What operating system are you using on your laptop?

Windows XP

Do you know if your laptop has a fixed IP address, or is it assigned by your Home Hub?

fixed (we had laptop way before the Home Hub

Do you know if your neighbours have wireless networks?

next door, dunno, but there are about 3 wirelesses that show up on my laptop

Is your Home Hub near any electrical equipment, such as a fridge?

no, nothing except phone chargers plugged in under the table

[HotStuff]

Could be Ollie was on the right track. If 3 wireless networks show up on your laptop does it show what channels they are on? Wireless channels overlap and can cause interference. Best choice is whichever of 1, 7 or 13 isn't being used by your neighbours. This willl require making a change on your Home Hub, but your laptop (and any other devices) should find the new channel without you having to tell it.

[OllieMartin]

This site has a video on changing the channel on a BT Home Hub:

How do I change the wireless channel on my BT Home Hub? | Help | BT.com

[Caro]

Also, make sure nothing else is trying to use the same IP address, printer or desktop, etc.

[TEB]

Are you a 100% certain that you are on a fixed IP address, just because your laptop was there before the home hub doesn't mean that your IP address is fixed..
If it was happening to mean with that error I would go into a DOS prompt and type ipconfig /all then press Enter(dont forget the space before the /) I would search the output for the above command for these lines.

Dhcp enabled this will be yes or no, if yes then your IP addresss isnt fixed
IP Address (most likely starts with) 192.168.x.x
Subnet mask most likely 255.255.255.0 (if the above starts with 192)
Default Gateway most likely 192.168.x.x

If the IP address starts with 169 (an APIPA address) then this means that the adaptor most likely hasn't got a fixed IP address but it cannot contact a valid DHCP device to obtain an IP address.
Depending on the output from ipconfig /all I may then type
ipconfig /release press enter
then ipconfig /flushdns press enter
then ipconfig /renew press Enter, within about 30 seconds of pressing enter you should get an IP address and a subnet mask being displayed if your adaptor can contact a DHCP device.

If all the above didnt work I then usually swear a bit > kick the dog and then remove the power from the router for 5 minutes

[Two_Sheds]

Genius guys, thank you.

I don't know if it's worked yet, but I've changed from channel 1 to 11.

I didn't know about wireless interference, or channels, or that I could put my hub into low-power at night.

Gawd bless this Grapevine

[Two_Sheds]

TEB: sorry, but you lost me at "are you 100%"

I just don't understand tech-talk

[Hilary B]

TEB: sorry, but you lost me at "are you 100%"

I just don't understand tech-talk

Not sure I understand this bit, but.. we used to use AOL, and I believe it assigns an IP each time you sign on, whereas other providers, you get one first time and that is yours henceforth, but it may be some other code name for the particular thing I am thinking about..

[TEB]

Not sure I understand this bit, but.. we used to use AOL, and I believe it assigns an IP each time you sign on, whereas other providers, you get one first time and that is yours henceforth, but it may be some other code name for the particular thing I am thinking about..

It depends on the how the software is written, in a windows server network an IP address is leased to a computer for 8 days, after the lease expires the device asks for another IP address and it is renewed and usually the computer will get the same IP, other devices do this differently, with the routers/wap devices that I have used I find they expire the IP address in a shorter period. In the early days of broadband (in the UK at least) most peeps were on a dynamic IP address, i.e. it would or could change every time you reconnected but a lot of ISP now allocate a static IP to a ADSL connection.

[HotStuff]

Not sure I understand this bit, but.. we used to use AOL, and I believe it assigns an IP each time you sign on, whereas other providers, you get one first time and that is yours henceforth, but it may be some other code name for the particular thing I am thinking about..

Every device attached to the internet has to have an IP address. IP stands for "Internet Protocol".

Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigns you an IP address when you connect to the Internet. Generally, unless you pay a bit extra you are not guaranteed to always have the same IP address each time you connect, although in practice with broadband you may find your IP address rarely changes.

Most households using broadband will have one ISP and therfore one IP address.

If you just have the one computer connected via your modem to the Internet then that computer will use the IP address assigned.

A lot of households these days have multiple devices connected to the Internet, but as far as your ISP is concerned you are still assigned one IP address. That IP address is used by your Router or Home Hub and that is the only device that your ISP's network talks to. Generally, your Router is responsible for assigning IP addresses to each of the devices in your household, in this case the IP addresses on your home network are referred to as dynamic. However, there is a way that you can over-ride this and assign specific IP addresses to specific devices, these are referred to as static.

[Hilary B]

Anyway, we suspect that the original problem was that the computer was connecting via the wrong hub at times?

[Gwyndy]

There is an excellent application called Network Stumbler which shows all wireless hubs in range and which channels they are using. I run this periodically just to make sure that my own wireless router channel is well away from any neighbouring routers. Network Stumbler is free and can be found at Downloads | NetStumbler.com.