How to test for connection drops?

listening

Problems usually show up when the network activity is high as in your Audio feeds and downloads. Timing becomes a critical issue. I have found that if I make my wireless packet size (fragmentation threshold) which is normally 2346 and make it the same size as the ethernet packets 1518 that it appears to perform better on exhaustive downloads. The Ap spends less time converting packet sizes and pays a little more attention to other things. It can reduce throughput but on error retransmissions it takes less processing work. This can be configured in your wireless adapter properties if you would like to give it try.

This is under the wireless connection properties, usually right click your connection in the tray and select properties browse around till you find the authentication tab and there is a checkbox there. In winxpsp1 this was by default checked but in SP2 it is unchecked by default.

Thanks to both Airhead and duane for your responses, I'll give your suggestions a try and see what happens. one interesting thing is I never used to have dificulties when I was using my old d-link di-713P. I got the new router but am still using old Orinoco Gold 802.11b cards so I wonder if there are some protocol issues between the older cards and the newer router? Perhaps it's worth looking for the latest Orinoco gold firmware as well...

You can try disabling XP's Wireless Zero Configuration Server that may be seeking out other networks in your area and trying to connect and is dropping the connection.

Duane :)

This isn't exactly what you want, but it will monitor the traffic. If it stops, you've been disconnected:

Download a copy of fping 2.09 at: 's an MSDOS program that does a better job than what Microsoft foists on the GUM (great unwashed masses) with Windoze. Run it continuously with 5 seconds between pings. If a packet evaporates or the connection is lost, the sequence number will show an error and beep on a timeout. See example below:

fping

-c -t 5000 -b- Fast pinger version 2.09 (c) Wouter Dhondt [166.84.62.125] with 32 bytes of data every 5000 ms: Reply[1] from 166.84.62.125: bytes=32 time=98 ms TTL=236 Reply[2] from 166.84.62.125: bytes=32 time=95 ms TTL=236 Reply[3] from 166.84.62.125: bytes=32 time=93 ms TTL=236 Reply[4] from 166.84.62.125: bytes=32 time=98 ms TTL=236 Reply[5] from 166.84.62.125: bytes=32 time=99 ms TTL=236 Ping statistics for 166.84.62.125: Packets: Sent = 5, Received = 5, Lost = 0 (0% loss) Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 93 ms, Maximum = 99 ms, Average = 97 ms

Great,

Thanks!