comedy wireless behaviour

I think this is strange, and somewhat esoteric behaviour, but if someone can make sense out of it, that would be good.

I have 2 computers, a Thinkpad with a pentium III, I think running windows 2000 and it has a wireless card in it, and then a shuttle pc I bought about 6 months ago with an AMD processor running windows xp with a silly USB dongle on a short extension, pretty standard so I hear.

We have a firewall/router, and a netgear 54thingys wireless hub to connect me and my housemates 3 pc's together. I am not the administrator

Right I hope that sets the scene. My laptop has always been fine, I boot it up, and fire up the browzer, and there we have it, super. The desktop however is another kettle of fish. Now if I boot up, the wireless connects or so it says, and yet fire up the browser, and you get the "resolving blah blah blah" at the bottom, and the connection times out. So I looked at the possible connections list, and there is next doors wireless connection up there as well as our netgear, and I can sometimes get a link with one or the other, and often not.

Now I have a nice piece of 3D modelling software, freeware on this pc called "Wings3d", and if I open that and start playing around with something, up pops a decent wireless connection?????

Can anyone make any sense of this? Is it possible that wings used to use dongle type security when it first came out some years back, and now gives the USB ports a special boost, or what.

This at the moment is more of an interest post than a critical one, as my bike mechanics tutor always used to say in his Bolton accent "if it works, don't fiddle with it".

Kind regards

The Frondster

Sounds like you and your neighbor either use the same channel and/or the same SSID and/or WEP/WPA key.. Change all of them and see what happens..

Pick a channel no-one else uses in you neighborhood. Pick your own SSID.. And definitely set a WEP key, better yet use WPA if you can, instead of WEP.

or set a prefered network. the windows wifi client will often automatically connect to the strongest signal. while i was on vacation with my laptop, i was having hella issues cause the wifi service i was legitimately using wasnt quite as strong as an unsecured nearby wireless router, so it was d/c me from my service and joining this other router. now while that routers connection was strong, it also had some security features which didnt allow me to use it "just like that". so id go from the service i was connected to, to a secured router which i couldnt use by default. then i found windows prefered access points feature and enabled only the one i wanted.