Laptop won't connect to 7800N, everything else will

[TheHoggleDog]

I have just bought and setup a 7800N. These are my specs, as such

BT Total Broadband ISP

Wireless Clients are ...

iMac (Lion 10.7.3)
Mac Book Pro (Lion 10.7.3)
2 x iPhones
1 x Apple TV
1 x Apple Airport Express Unit
1 x PlayStation 3
1 x Dell Latitude E6410 Windows XP SP3 **

The Dell laptop is a corporate (work) laptop, all my other home gear, as you can see, is mainly Apple stuff just for personal / family use. So far I haven't made any inroads to the advanced features in the 7800N, but I was not impressed with BT's homehub from an internal network perspective. I wanted something with better coverage that went further.

For the moment, I have the router setup to broadcast a wireless network with WEP encryption key and it is running with the firmware it would have been delivered with

Everything BUT my XP laptop will connect to the network. When I try to connect the Dell XP, I get ...

"Windows is unable to connect to the selected network. The network may no longer be in range. Please refersh the list of available networkds, and try to connect again."

Obviously it's not out of range, it would seem the router is rejecting the connection. Everything else connects like a dream without any problems, but the XP laptop will not. As I noted, it's a corporate laptop so I have no rights to update the wireless card driver, but I've never had a problem with it joining any network previously.

Does anyone have an idea on what the problem might be?

[billion_fan]

Have you tried a different security type eg WPA or WPA2?

Have you also tried to disable security to see if your XP machine can connect to the 7800N?

Have you tried to change the channel the router outputs on?

Finally have you tried to change the channel width the router outputs on from 20/40mhz to 20mhz?

[TheHoggleDog]

Thanks for you reply billion_fan!

So I upgraded to the latest firmware, then, reconfigured the device for WPA2/PSK (from one extreme to the next) and now the laptop has connected without any issue, I can only imagine at this point that it did not work with the type of encryption I had set, although I would find that odd.

Is WEP so old now it can cause issues? Before the update, one of the PC's that was connecting OK (iMac) dropped off then just wouldn't reconnect (timeout). I'll see how it goes post upgrade / WPA2/PSK ...

Thanks again

Luke