How to get wireless working (properly) with Sitecom Wireless USB micro adapter 300N on Windows 7?
- by Timo
The question says it all, but more detail follows ;)
I've got a new computer that runs Windows 7 64-bits (Home Edition) and I'd like to connect it to my wireless home network (Sitecom wireless gigabit router 300N wl-352 v1 002) with a Sitecom wireless USB micro adaptapter 300 wl-352 V2 001.
After installing the router (i.e. connected to the modem and power) and ensuring that wireless is indeed enabled, I've installed the driver of the USB adapter on the new computer described above. After the installation (drivers and utility on CD) completes successfull I rebooted my computer and inserted the USB adapter. After discovering the right network and connecting to it using the network key, a connection is succesfully made. (Using the Sitecom 300N USB Wireless LAN utility).
In the LAN utility I can see that the signal strength is approximately 50% and connection quality is approximately 80%. Judging from these numbers I assumed that all was fine and started to use the connection (reading news on nu.nl, a dutch news site), but noticed that the connection was lost several times in a very short time span, but each time the connections was resumed, resulting in the 50/80 percent numbers described above. However, the website was not loaded completely and often a timeout would be reported.
When inspecting the drivers through Device Management (Windows' Apparaatbeheer in dutch) there were no errors/warnings; everything seemed to be in order.
In an attempt to solve this, I downloaded the latest drivers for the USB adapter, but the problems remained.
Finally I tried to connect the computer with a Siemens Gigaset USB Adapter 108. This process was a troublesome since I had to download a driver (from the site above) and tell Windows (7) to use the Windows Vista driver when installing the new hardware, since there is (was) no Windows 7 driver available.
This resulted in a usable connection, although not very stable when reconfiguring the router. Which took the form of selecting a different wireless channel on the router, even using the Sitecom utility mentioned above to check if there were other networks communicating on that channel (and thus picking a channel that was not used by other networks). Again no result when changing back to the Sitecom USB adapter. Note that this means (I think) that I could use the internet connection with the Siemens adapter, meaning the problem was not in the router.
So:
How to get wireless working (properly) with Sitecom Wireless USB micro adapter 300N on Windows 7?
PS Sorry, but should be able to post one link, while I had links in place for the USB adapter, router and the siemens adapter in place as well, but I'm not (yet) allowed to post these... (The site says I can post one link, but only when no links are present will it allow me to post the question...)
