PC won't pick up broadband - any suggestions?

I have a Belkin G Mimo wireless router for my BT broadband connection (the BT HomeHub wasn't very good). Two Macintosh laptops in the house pick up the wireless signal fine, but my old Dell PC, which uses Windows XP, will not pick it up. I've tried everything to get it to connect and it sometimes briefly picks up the signal before losing it again. This same thing happened about a year ago, but then it started working again for no apparent reason. Now it's suddenly gone wrong again. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be grateful.

This ia stab in the dark.. When someone says "its worked before, but not now" then I always take it that there was a change in the programme set-up. Maybe an automatic update that you were unaware of from last year? A firmware update?

Might help..

http://www.belkin.com/uk/support/article/?lid=enu&pid=F5D9630uk4A&aid=7135&scid=314

As I said, stab in the dark and some smart arse wikiwomble will pop along in a few minutes and tell you to switch it on!!

Are you using wireless dongle on the PC, if so the PC usually has to be pretty high spec if you are using good encryption/security (WPA or better WPA2). If you use a PCI card they work soooo much better.

One thing that often helps is to ensure the IP address for DNS is that of the router and not an internet address. If an internet address is used this double-compounds any slight drop outs or internet delays, using the router as a DNS cache (which they all can) alleviates this.

I am sorry I haven't got much free time at the moment otherwise I could help you much more, I have a lot of experience/brainaches with belkin wireless (albeit pre-mimo).

Please PM me and I could see if I could squeeze in a visit, a quick look can be a lot less time-consuming than a few thousand words.

This happened to my daughters dell you have to manually turn the wireless zero on right click my comp then go to manage and make sure wireless zero is started it should be automatic but hers kept stopping and then after doing this every time we turned laptop on it for weeks just started to leave itself on weird.

Yes, angie, many manufacturers use there own proprietory sofware instead of Wireles Zero Config, my experience is that their software is always battling with Windows, it is better to just use the manufacturers driver and let windows do the management.

Reminds me that some programs that automatically update or update-checks (zonealarm, avg, windows etc) often hit the wirelss connection a bit early before it is stable, I put all programs on manual update to prevent this early surge and this seems to reduce problems.

im having the same problem, it gets a signal but only says "local" no internet

its a pain in the ass as its my entertainment pc

Make a copy of all the settings on your modem, and then reset it. I did this everytime I had a connection fault and it worked.

Thanks for all your helpful suggestions, everyone. I'll let you know how I get on with it.