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Netgear MA111

"I am having serious problems with my wireless Netgear MA111 USB adaptor v1. It works fine in the beginning but as time went on it increasingly after a certain period of time (1hr or 2) the icon in the system tray (the computer that flashes different colors) will freeze so that you cannot pull the menu from it and then disappear from the tray. The adaptor itself shuts off its connection light and is hot to the touch. taking it out and plugging it back in will only cause it to light up for a second then it goes back out. Even switching to a fresh adaptor does no good. I have to restart the computer to gain a working connection. I've tried hanging the adaptor in a place where it is air cooled but even then it still just shuts off after an hour or two. I've upgraded to the latest drivers for the adaptor. nothing seems to be amiss with my MR814 v2 router..."

I posted this august of last year. Nobody could figure out what was wrong. After a little while though the problem mysteriously vanished. Now its back again. There hasn't been any change in my system other than I started using bittorrent a bit but that was a little while after the problem reappeared.

Reply to
Blah
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I don't know why it's going out, but I suspect it isn't because of heat. I have the WG111 (802.11g version of your adaptor) and it gets very hot after an hour or two, but without that problem (yet...). I'm not a big fan of the Netgear softare, it seems pretty crappy to me. Did you try using bult in XP networking? (if you have xp, that is.) I'm only using the Netgear stuff because I can't figure out how to enter a

128 bit WEP key in the XP networking.
Reply to
Drew B.

XP Wireless Zero Config is fairly smart. When you first hit "Show Available Wireless...", it tries to connect without encryption, when that fails, it asks for a password (twice). It doesn't matter if the password is ASCII, Hex, 64 or 128 bits. It will try each combination until it finds a matching and successful connection. However, it's not smart enough to deal with various manufacturers creative interpretations of ASCII to Hex key conversions. Therefore, I always use Hex and never worry about the problem.

XP WZC also has a rather dumb way of proclaiming that the WEP keys don't match or the key exchange has failed. It sits there with only "Obtaining IP Address..." in the window and eventually declares that you have "limited connectivity". It looks like you've made the connection, but you eventually end up with a 169.254.xxx.xxx default IP address. Not very useful. I wasted quite a bit of time chaseing DHCP issues, which were not the problem, until I realized the MS simply forgot to display a suitable key exchange failure error message.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Tell me about it, Netgear doesn't even answer its tech support email. They should have a big sticker on each box proclaiming that you're on your own after you buy their hardware.

I'm using windows 2000, the light will go off as I described above or it will stay on but I will no longer be online and I am unable to disconnect the card from the taskbar. I've fiddled with disabling the DHCP Server service which suddenly has be giving me errors but it simply causes the problem to alternate between the two abovementioned forms and not go away.

Reply to
Blah

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