[colinp]

I have a Mini 1012 netbook with an Atheros AR 9285 wireless card, running XP home sp3. I have a Trendnet wireless router for my gateway. This netbook will not connect wirelessly. I have the newest driver from Dell and even tried the newest driver direct from Atheros, but still no connection. The network shows up, so it sees the router, but I get no IP and after several attempts, the card gets a red X across it. However, when I try ipconfig, I get this:

C:\Documents and Settings\user>ipconfig

Windows IP Configuration


Ethernet adapter Wireless Network Connection 5:

Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected


I can ping myself (loopback), but nothing outside.
C:\Documents and Settings\user>ping 127.0.0.1

Pinging 127.0.0.1 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128

Ping statistics for 127.0.0.1:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

I can connect fine, however, with the ethernet card.

Now I also have a 1545 laptop (bought at the same time) with the Broadcom 1397 wireless card and it connects fine with win 7 and ubuntu. Also an ipod, HP wireless printer and another Toshiba laptop that also connect fine with wireless.
McAfee Internet suite is installed on the 1012, however, I did try and disable it but still no connection. (again it connects fine with ethernet)

Now sometimes, rarely, if I uninstall/re-install the driver it will connect, but that no longer seems to work.
Do you think it is a faulty card, or an incorrect setting? All settings are windows XP default.

Router settings:

WPA PSK TKIP

Beacon interval: 100

RTS threshold: 2346

Fragmentation threshold: 2346

DTIM interval: 1

TX rates (MBps): auto

11g only mode: disable

transmit power: full

"all settings default"

Pinging the gateway of course gets a "destination host unreachable"

I tried a ubuntu live USB and everything works fine, except of course the wireless connection (actually no wireless shows at all, but I would probably have to install it and then get the driver).

Colin

[reflex]

I dunno about your problems in Windows, but the card should be supported in current versions of Ubuntu. I don't recall having to do anything special to get it running on my 1012.

Try running "sudo modprobe ath9k" in a terminal on the LiveCD/USB. That'll manually load the driver (kernel module) for that specific wifi card.

[colinp]

I think you may have hit the proverbial nail on the head. I installed lucid NBR and the card was picked up without having to install any drivers. Several reboots and it still connects. However, booting into XP and still no connection.

That means nothing wrong with the card or my router. It's something on the windows side, which means either XP or more than likely McAfee (which shouldn't surprise me at all, as I used to do tech support and 9 out of 10 times, connection issues were because of Norton/McAfee).
I will ts some more, maybe a new driver will come out for windows XP, or I will get rid of McAfee and install MS Security Essentials (seems to work ok in 7 and Vista).

Anyway thanks for the direction for me to follow. It's my daughter's netbook, so she may yet be brought over to linux. I run linux on my desktop and dual-boot on my 1545 and so far I'm not too impressed with 7, so that may go yet.

Colin