XP home + Irish Broadband wireless problems

Ardent

Guys,

Posted this on the Broadband forum in reponse to another posters question. I hope you don't mind me posting this here as well in case any of you know what is happening. My specs are:

Pentium 4
Abit A17 motherboard
Windows XP Home SP1
ATI 9800 pro
Irish Broadband Ripwave modem (USB)
Active USB cable (5 metres)

Computer is about 6 weeks old with a clean install of XP, MS Office 97, Doom 3, Far Cry and the IBB software. Have never had any problems with the PC prior to signing up with IBB.

Moo, I have XP home too, here's what was happening for me:

1) Strong signal on the modem near the window, red/orange continuous light. No problems there.

2) Install the drivers as per documentation and the Navini diagnostic software (i.e., where it shows PC <----> Modem <----> Antenna with the green ticks/red crosses)

3) Try to access the web or ping www.google.ie and the modem goes from steady orange light to flashing red, i.e., lost signal. Also, in the diagnostic tool you can see the green tick between the modem and antenna turn to a red cross, sometimes this happens between the PC and modem as well.

4) Turn off the modem and turn it back on again. Steady orange light again and green ticks in the software. Ping google, get a couple of responses and the modem goes to flashing red again and the pings time out. Red crosses appear.

5) Reboot the PC, load up the diagnostic software, reset the modem. Green ticks. Do nothing and watch the diagnoctic diagram for a while. After a minute or so, green ticks turn to red crosses all over the shop and the light on the modem flash red yet again.

6) Repeat the above until you're blue in the face.


A mate of mine came over with his laptop and hooks up my modem to it (he's running XP Pro) and installs the same drivers and diagnostic tool. The modem works like a dream and he gets amazing broadband speeds with no dropouts. Very frustrating for me to say the least.

Hours later, I was finally able to get the modem to stay on a steady orange light with my PC by doing the following:

1) Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to being up task manager
2) Kill all non essential processes such as ctfmon.exe, soundman.exe, anything with ati (e.g., ati2vid.exe) if you own a 9800 pro gfx card etc etc.
3) While still in task manager, click on the memory column and identify the instance of svchost.exe that's using the most memory (mine was consuming around 17 megabytes of memory) and kill it.
4) Click start--->run----> and type services.msc
5) In the resultant list of services, manually start up Shell Hardware Detection, DHCP Client and Wireless Zero Configuration (don't know if the latter is required)
6) Reset the modem

I was able to get stable broadband access by doing all of the above with no perceptable problems. Because it was in the early hours of the morning before I had nailed this process of getting it to work, I wasn't able to test it for much more than 20-30 minutes. It seemed to be finally working for me and I went to bed happy.

Woke up the next morning and the modem couldn't get any sort of signal and this is still the situation as I write this. So even though I think I was able to sort out the XP home + USB ripwave modem issues I can't comprehensively test it because IBB have f**ked something up and my modem can't get a signal anymore. Sod's law.

If anyone knows what the hell all of the above is about I'd appreciate an answer!!

astrofool

sounds like the IBB signal isn't strong enough in your area tbh.

Ardent

astrofool wrote:

sounds like the IBB signal isn't strong enough in your area tbh.

Steady red/orange light indicates a signal, orange would be a particularly good signal. I live near the digital hub in Dublin 8 and I'm certainly withing IBB's coverage map. Also, as I said, my mate called over and hooked his laptop up to the modem (which wasn't moved from it's position) and the speeds he was getting were very impressive. This was all on wednesday night.

Thursday onwards there was zero signal and the modem is in the exact same spot. But that's an aside....

The issue I'm concerned about is why the modem keeps flaking out with my PC until I start killing loads of processes in task manager. Yet with my mate's laptop there's no problems. I flashed my bios thinking there might have been problems with the USB ports/power but that doesn't seem to have been the case. My gut feeling is it has something to do with XP Home.

Another user seems to be experiencing the same problem so I don't think it's just my hardware. Very bizarre.

MazdaMan

As you say it sounds like something is starting on boot up causing the issue. Try the following.

Click Start - Run
Type MSCONFIG click ok
Click on Startup tab and uncheck items from the list that you Ended task on previously.

Also check under the Services tab in MSconfig, Be sure to place a tick in "Hide all Microsoft services". What you are left with are 3rd party program services. Uncheck a couple at a time and reboot each time till you identify the one causing the issue.

Be aware that some services will need to run. There will be one there that the Broadband modem will use.

But if something fails to start that you require, it's only a matter of going back into MSConfig - Statup and/or Services to reselect the item that you require.