Medion 8835PC - Wireless Connection Solved

[xtopher]

System is Medion 8835, Philips 220EW 22” LCD Monitor, D-Link635 ndraft router, Logitec speakers, Lexmark scanner/copier all bought as separates as bargains came along. Virgin broadband cable modem basic 2Mb speed. Whole system bit of a jump for me dumping my Millenium setup bought by my employer as a ‘leaving’ present! Sorry Bill Gates no XP profit from me!
Cable enters in downstairs lounge so that’s where the modem and router sits – nestling amongst the TV, Video, DVD, Virgin digibox, and cordless phone a metre away (hoping for no interference). Medion is in upstairs office – my walls are all plasterboard so no solids to degrade signal too much. Don’t stack the modem on top of the router; they get a bit warm!
Thankyou Virgin for the extra long Cat5 cable ‘cos I didn’t realise that to initially set up router required hard wiring. Didn’t look pretty for 3 weeks!
Initially set up the router via the enclosed CD wizard but immediately I started having problems with connectivity but after restoring/rebooting modem and router CD kept stopping half way thro the setup process. Call to D-Link very helpful and I soon learned how to use the built in manual configuration.
It is very easy to do as most settings are automatic – DHCP and IP get automatically from ISP, it has 13 channels but defaults to ‘find best’, clone the PC’s MAC address. Didn’t understand what this was all about – a little research; once the router has the MAC address of your PC the router is then ‘recognised as your PC’ . But this sent me off on a wild goose chase because the Ethernet board and the Wireless board have their own MAC address. Although the router clones the Ethernet card (obvious really as I was wired into it) somehow the router then gets the MAC address of the Wireless card. Eventually I found out how to view the Wireless status. So I had a rock solid Wireless connection but could not get any Web pages thro.
Thank goodness my daughter is staying with me at the moment – she opens her wireless Toshiba connects straightaway happy as Larry off to bed to watch BBC iPlayer! Well for 3 weeks she’s okay and Dad is frustrated as hell! Apart from endlessly rebooting the router and modem these are the other things I tried. Note I went on numerous Forums and the last thing I wanted/didn’t dare do was reload all the software in a hope to cure connectivity as the system was brand new. So I tried the easy stuff after learning how to ipconfig/all which told me everything was setup correctly, IP addresses being correctly allocated etc. Next I tried changing MTU from it’s default of 1500 to various lower settings in the PC – still no web connection.
Then I learnt how to PING! This has been the most valuable problem identifier. Wired, I could ping my router as you’d expect as web pages got thro this way. Wirelessly I could’nt ping my router; that was it I now knew where my problem was. Modem working, router working cos of laptop wireless connection, PC working wired ie Ethernet card ok. The only item left was the wireless card and on looking at its Properties I realised it used a Driver but letting the PC go off to try and discover an update set me back a week. A visit to the Ralink website revealed a recent driver update in August downloaded and BINGO wireless connection, ping router ok web pages ok – PROBLEM SOLVED! It’s a good job I am already follically challenged! Hope this hasn’t bored you all and that it helps newbies et al .