While using my wireless connection my computer freezes

[DEM441]

Hi, I'm new here so if I’ve put this in the wrong place I apologise. I'll try to explain this as best I can however my computer knowledge isn't all that great.

I have a problem that I don't think makes any sense; The internal wireless card in my laptop stopped working a few months back and on discovering how hard it is to get anyone to look at, let alone fix, a dell laptop I decided to purchase a PCI Wireless card (Philips SNN6500 Wireless PCMCIA Adapter 11a/b/g), however since purchasing the card my laptop freezes while I use the wireless network in my house. (I don’t know if its important but it does this randomly, sometimes it will go several hours without freezing other times a few minutes) and so I thought It was probably an issue with the Wireless card, however when I went back to my parents house a few weeks back and used their wireless network my laptop did not freeze at all!?! And so I don’t understand… is there something wrong with the network in my house? 5 of us share it and I’m the only one who has any problems.

I hope you can help me; the random freezing is making it very difficult to do any work. (It’s frozen once just typing this)

 

[sine184]

Tell me something:
does your computer frize so thet you must restart it or does just your internet frize?

 

[DEM441]

Sorry i should have said, my computer freezes so that i have to restart

 

[Tmagic650]

DEM441,
did you or somone else install the PCMCIA wireless adapter? The drivers and setup program should have come on a CD. You may need to disable the on-board wireless device in the laptops bios

 

[DEM441]

Hi, yeah I installed the PCMCIA wireless adapter myself, and yeah the drivers etc did come on CD. The on-board wireless card doesn't show up in my network connections so i assume I have disabled it already, to be honest i don't remember if I did or not.

 

[Tmagic650]

Ok,
did you set up a secured wireless connection, including a password and such?

 

[sine184]

Are you close to your internet provider?
I know that back home some people have problems because providers aren't as good as they should be.
I also know that some people who didn't have a secure whireless had some problems with DOS attacks.

 

[DEM441]

Hi, I don't think our wireless connection is secured with passwords etc, talking to my housemate who set the network up it appears that when he tried to set up a secure network it failed somehow and so he just set up an unsecure one, which we have used ever since. although if it was the unsecure network wouldn't the other users have similar problems?
We (me and my housemate) tried to secure our network this morning but could not work out how to do it, can we secure a current connection or do we have to start over again setting up a new network?

 

[sine184]

Talking from my head, so I don't know if this is 100% true
If you are using XP I think you should go to Start/Control Panel/Whirelwss connections, and there I think win searches for available connections.
Then you go to the settings where you can add your connections and you click on your connection (right click/properties) and there you can set up a secure connection with all passwords and all thet stuf.
I hope it will help.