wireless networking problems

right, another two problems that i could do with your expert advice on, both to do with wireless networking...

the first problem relates to my sisters laptop. now this is going to sound a bit silly, because i dont really know all the facts. my sister has just bought a new dell laptop. it is running windows xp, and has a dell wlan card built into it. i set it up for her, and it connected to our wireless network at home just fine (we use a netgear adsl modem/wireless access point.) but the following week, she took it back to university, where she has a d-link wireless access point (an airplus extreme one, i think, from the model number she gave me), and the laptop has ceased to be able to acess the internet. the wireless indicator in the system tray indicates it is connected to her access point, with a strong signal, but internet explorer will not display any pages, at all. i tried to help her (albeit over the phone, which is why i cant describe the problem all that well) and got her to fiddle around with her internet connection settings a bit, but this isnt my area of expertise, and i was hoping someone here could possibly provide a few pointers as to why this is happening. the only other thing of note is that the dell wlan card has its own configuration utlity that you can use. i tried getting her to disable the wireless zero configuration utlity in xp, and using dell's own thing, but the same thing happened. im sorry about the sketchy details, but i was just hoping there was an obvious reason for this, to save me a trip up north to fix it for her!

the second problem concerns my own desktop computer, connected to our wireless access point via a netgear usb 2.0 wireless network adapter. my room is furthest away from the router, and it as such recieves a very low connection strength. ive used the supplied usb extension cable, tried putting it high and low, all over my room as far as the usb cable will stretch, but it still drops the connection every 5 minutes or so, which is quite annoying. so i was wondering if there was a cheap way of extending the range of either my usb adapter or the access point? i dont want to do anything too permanent, as i will be moving out again in september, but any siggestions would be welcome!

thanks in advance,

matt

 

Sister's Laptop

As far as your sister's laptop goes, see if she has Norton or McAfee on there... often the firewall can prevent access to an unknown port. Try enabling port access attempt notification in the Windows firewall so that any time an outside port is attempting to access your PC, a window will pop-up letting you know the deal and asking whether or not you want to permit it.