Here is the situation.
I have a house that is laid out from north to south at about 60 feet, with two walls between one bedroom on the opposite end from the access point, and the same with the other bedroom except it is not in direct line with the access point. Without an expander there is no signal to these two rooms, except in the doorways. Placing a wireless laptop in the doorways gives me
2 out of 5 bars according to one Vista laptop, and a weak signal on an XP SP2 desktop no higher than 11Mbps. But for practical reasons they cannot reside in the doorways.The expander, if placed at an outlet in the hallway near the doorways, gives no boost at all. If mounted on either doorway, it boosts the signal significantly to the workstations no matter where they are in the room, but ONLY for the room in which the expander is placed. I've upgraded the wireless card on the XP PC to the "Speedbooster" version that touts 35% extra power, and it hasn't helped at all. So in this situation I would need TWO expanders unless someone can tell me what I am doing wrong.
I have the expander working steadily now. This was helped greatly by the fact that I trashed the install disk that came with it and did it manually. (In fact, all LinkSys wireless cards in the house operate more efficiently when installed manually, using the Windows interface.)
Any suggestions are welcome.
Thank you.