Are there known compatibility problems between Belkin Wireless G cards and 
Netgear DG834N (note the "N") routers?

My sister is having a very strange problem with her network which is related 
to one PC. From that PC she can reliably access the internet (web, email) 
and she can ping other PCs on the network. But other PCs can only 
intermittently ping that PC. All the PCs are connected by wireless to a 
Netgear DG834N router. The affected PC is about 20 feet from the router with 
direct line of sight and reports "Good" or "Excellent" signal strength.

My first thought was the Norton 360 firewall on the affected PC. But I 
checked that the "trusted network" settings related to the correct MAC 
address of the router, I tried disabling the firewall and I even uninstalled 
Norton. All to no avail: I got intermittent ability to ping, which seemed to 
be unrelated to whether the firewall was on, off or totally removed. Also, 
the name resolution failed: at times when the PC was pingable from other 
PCs, I could access shares by IP address but not by name (eg "net view 
\\192.168.0.2" worked but "net view \\pc" failed with error 53 - name not 
found).

Eventually I tried using an Ethernet connection from the affected PC to the 
router - and everything worked perfectly, even after Norton was reinstalled.

Could there be some incompatibility between the Belkin PCI wireless card in 
the PC and the Netgear router? Or is it just a faulty card? I'm not sure 
what model of Belkin card it is and I'm not sure whether the router is 
running in full Wireless N mode or Wireless B/G compatibility mode: I only 
thought about this after I'd left them last night. Another thought occurred 
to me: the problem may date back to when they changed from a Netgear DG834G 
router to the DG834N because the former kept dropping its ADSL connection.

In article <rP6dnTEcbvkBFYjVnZ2dneKdnZydnZ2d@plusnet>, Mortimer says...
> Are there known compatibility problems between Belkin Wireless G cards and 
> Netgear DG834N (note the "N") routers?
> 
> My sister is having a very strange problem with her network which is related 
> to one PC. From that PC she can reliably access the internet (web, email) 
> and she can ping other PCs on the network. But other PCs can only 
> intermittently ping that PC. All the PCs are connected by wireless to a 
> Netgear DG834N router. The affected PC is about 20 feet from the router with 
> direct line of sight and reports "Good" or "Excellent" signal strength.
> 
> My first thought was the Norton 360 firewall on the affected PC. 

It's Norton - it's always Norton. 


-- 
Conor

I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't 
looking good either. - Scott Adams

"Conor"  wrote in message 
news:67lnpfF2ovoocU2@mid.individual.net...
> In article <rP6dnTEcbvkBFYjVnZ2dneKdnZydnZ2d@plusnet>, Mortimer says...
>> Are there known compatibility problems between Belkin Wireless G cards 
>> and
>> Netgear DG834N (note the "N") routers?
>>
>> My sister is having a very strange problem with her network which is 
>> related
>> to one PC. From that PC she can reliably access the internet (web, email)
>> and she can ping other PCs on the network. But other PCs can only
>> intermittently ping that PC. All the PCs are connected by wireless to a
>> Netgear DG834N router. The affected PC is about 20 feet from the router 
>> with
>> direct line of sight and reports "Good" or "Excellent" signal strength.
>>
>> My first thought was the Norton 360 firewall on the affected PC.
>
> It's Norton - it's always Norton.

Though evidently not in this case since I uninstalled it and then ran the 
Norton removal tool. What turned intermittent working into 100% working was 
changing from Belkin wireless card to Ethernet.

But I know what you mean about Norton. I used to advocate using it, but 
since about Norton 2006 it's got worse and worse: more obscure to configure 
(eg the firewall), less informative (on some versions I cannot find out the 
expiry date of the virus subscriptions or the date of the current virus 
definition version) and much much more bloated (despite what Norton may say, 
you cannot run Norton 2007 or 360 with less than 512 MB RAM).