2/3 laptops cant use router!

[Ashton]

I have what seems to be a very interesting puzzle.

I have a Linksys Router WRT54G
I have 3 laptops: Compaq (Vista, full-size) Asus (XP, netbook), Macbook (OSX 10.6, 13")
I have a working internet connection and WiFi turned on

Two rooms are involved. The room the router is in, and the Room on the other side of the stairwell

The Stairwell is roughly 12' wide (from plywood-then-sheetrock wall, to stairs, to sheetrock-sheetrock, to wooden stairs, to sheetrock-then-plywood) the router is sitting 3" away from the wall on one side of it. The laptop(s) is(are) sitting roughly 3" away from the wall on the other side of it. There are no power cables in the path of the wireless (they're run through the ceiling roughly 6' above the router/laptops)

The Compaq Holds the signal and connects with ease, surfing the 'net and streaming 640x480 videos

The Asus Netbook will connect and surf/stream, but will randomly dissconnect and will randomly completely lose track of the router (showing "no wireless connection available")

The Macbook will occasionally see the router, but tell me "network timeout" when trying to connect, and will usually NOT see it at all (if I tell it to "join other network" and type in linksys, it can *find* it, but still gives me a timeout error)

I was having issues with the linksys router to begin with, so today I installed the Tomato Firmware. Same issues happened, nothing changed.

Now, my question is this:
What is wrong, is the router not sending properly, or are the laptops not receiving properly?

My guess is the Compaq simply has a better card in it, while the other two (Apple+Asus) use lower-powered cards to conserve power (I made sure to turn off "power save" mode on both before testing just to make sure it wasn't software-controlled)

I also tried changing channels in case the default one was congested by other RF devices, no dice...

Using hardwire Cat-6 from router around wall to laptop works perfectly (but rather detracts from the mobility of the laptop...)

Any suggestions are welcome...

 

[Ashton]

Not that anyone seems to care, but I found my problem and have solved it.

1. Poked through Tomato until I found the "transmit power" setting and maxed it out
2. the wall I'm against is a deadzone. No logical reason why, but if I move just 2' in either direction I get perfect reception,

 

[gimp]

be careful with increasing the transmit power to 100%.
it can cause the thing to overheat, since they are designed to only transmit at about 50%

so if you notice it start to crap out now and again, that could be the cause.

 

[dashpuppy]

Not that anyone seems to care, but I found my problem and have solved it.

1. Poked through Tomato until I found the "transmit power" setting and maxed it out
2. the wall I'm against is a deadzone. No logical reason why, but if I move just 2' in either direction I get perfect reception,

deadzones are usually caused by interference, ie wiring in the wall, or some kinda portable phone.

I remember when panasonic came out with there first 2.4gig phones, and were left on channel6, guess what dlink's default channel was ? Guess how many people complained about dropped calls and slow internet that year ?