Hi all,
My girlfriend just bought a new Acer LAPTOP. She brought it home and set up her wireless connection, but it will only access select sites. Gmail works, and it will do a google search, but we can't get on any other site from there. It won't access cnn.com, or pretty much any other site. When she brings the computer SOMEWHERE else and accesses a different wireless network, she is able to access any website and the computer has full functionality.

Any suggestions for making her home wireless network work properly? Thanks so much!What's the make/model of the router she is using, and the model number of the Acer laptop ?




Have her plug into the wireless router with a cable and see if there's improvment.. If the problem is corrected, then we've isolated the problem to the wireless environment..

Hey thanks so much. plugging in got us working to full functionality so it looks like a wireless problem. the make of the acer is aspire 5532 and the router is netgear wireless cable modem gateway cg824wg.  thanks again.It doesn't look like there's is an updated driver for the built in wireless card in your laptop, so the only other things I can think of at this point, is that your gateway needs a firmware update, or you need to try using another wireless channel.  I've seen this kind of thing before (firmware issues) with with Windows 7 and older wireless gateways which support only the 802.11/b standard, which is the case with your gateway.


Do you know how to access the gateway's configuration page from a broswer, like Internet Explorer ?  If so, try using a different wireless channel.

Look here at Wikipedia and notice the Channels and international compatibility

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11

Your gateway supports any ONE of the many channels listed, the trick is to make sure you select a channel that's not being used by any others in your area.  You could be getting interference from SOMEONE's wireless router in the area, that using the same channel as you...  You need to be using a channel not used by anyone else, and it should not overlap with other channel in the area... for example, channel 1, 6, and 11 do not overlap... 

If you've tried other wireless channels and the situation has not improved, I'd say try updating the firmware in the gateway...  Once you access the gateway home page through the browser there may be a utility you can use to look for the latest firmware for the device...  Contact the Manufacturer for the latest firmware if you have trouble... I went over there to Netgear and had a hard time finding firmware DOWNLOADS..