Windows 7: Problems with School Network.

Hi all, my university's network is a hidden network which requires user's credentials to login.

Security type: 802.1x
Encryption type: WEP
Network location profile: Work

My laptop's wireless adapter is a Ralink 802.11 bgn 1T1R network card with the latest drivers installed for Windows 7. I am on Home Premium by the way.



I get Excellent signal in limited areas around the school and sometimes even gets disconnected from the network totally. When it gets disconnected, the adapter can't detect the network.

I had no problems previously on Win XP with Good and Excellent signals around school. I've asked the techies and they said the network has endorsed Win 7.

I'm sure i got the connection settings correctly as i followed their manual guide.

Will it be a case of wireless adapter incompatibility issue? Please advise, thanks!

Hi RuMmYtUb, I assume you were able t to log on without any issue, when you were in range of your work's wifi. If you do, but get disconnected randomly, my first question is, do you have any third party software on your machine that manages wifi connections?

Hi aem, nope. I don't have any 3rd party software managing the connections. Windows is managing it.

Do you know if your school has setup any non standard security with the wifi? At my work, i need to be given access to wifi on the work's security settings. Not sure if your school is similar. Any wifi device can detect your school wifi network if it is within range, but whether you can use the wifi 100% is a matter of setup at the network's end.

School's network is a hidden network which don't broadcast its SSID i suppose because students need to manually configure and add the network for it to be detected.

As such, non-students will not be able to detect the network. Only students are able to detect and login with our domain username and password credentials.

If Windows 7 doesn't detect the wifi cos i't hidden, how do u connect to it? I'm thinking it detects the SSID within a certain range, and your machine is set to auto login, pending work authentication.

What i mean is sometimes my internet is dropped off the network in certain areas of the school.

Am able to detect however there are intermittent droppings

I've had issues with this too....

I have ran through more routers than Jennifer Lopez has ran through husbands....

The type of router and the type of network card that you have makes a hell of a difference.

Maybe the university is not using the same type of router in all the hot spots and when your card is hopping signals and may have trouble catching on.

I know it may sound kind of ehhh shot out of the dark talking but its not too far fetched.

I assume they are using WEP becaue alot of the laptops that they have on that university isn't up to par with the rest of the world using WAP.

What do you think AEM?

@ AEM, you can configure windows to connect to a hidden SSID,

I had some issues with this in vista, none in 7, Thank god.
I was getting tired of the Reboot, But I think the Network dropped me cause of mass bandwidth consumption due to my vpn to my servers....

Road Runner better be glad that that i don't hack the modem to consume my whole blocks bandwith.... they promised me and i never get what i paid for....

I got torrrents to download and I am not getting them in a timely matter. I think it is time to fix that.