I am currently dealing with a little annoyance which is not having a reliable wireless connection. 

Now, I've always had issues to some degree or another with my wireless signal at home, as has much of the wireless community in general.  Wireless just isn't as reliable, period.  However, up until this Sunday (or at least I think it was Sunday) I was getting a usable signal, if not the most highly performing one.

For the life of me, I can't think of what changed either purposefully or not that may have caused my current signal woes.

My first suspect was the wireless card I was using.  Mind you I am running an "ancient" Dell Precision M50 workstation which doesn't have wireless integrated, so my wireless connection comes via a Netgear WG511 card.  I was initially using the "v1" of the card, or simply WG511, and given my initial suspition I then tried the "v2" of the same card, and even tried different PC card slots (although I only have 2).  Because of the change of hardware, I also uninstalled the "old" drivers and installed the new drivers that go with the v2 of the card... all by the book... no good.

I run a  Netgear WGR614v4 Wireless Router as my main router, and also a Netgear WAG302 Access Point.  Both of them are located in my basement, both within arms reach of each other (that is, if routers and access points had arms).  What I know I am doing wrong, is that I should place the Access Point in the highest level of the house.  My excuse is that it is an older house, brick, hard to impossible to fish cabling through walls for an amateur cabling tech.  So what I will probably do as I further analyze my situation is probably have a cabling contractor run a couple of cables to my 1st and 2nd level from the basement, and use those to connect the access point.  I will follow up on that.

Back to the problem on hand, and trying to keep the idea on course, although the "solution" would appear to be to move the source of the signal, I was presented today with an interesting curve ball to deal with.  My wife brought home her work laptop a Dell Latitude D510 with Dell Integrated Wireless card and placing the laptop on the exact same spot as where I experience the lowest signal on the aforementioned crippled laptop, I get a great signal strength reading... very weird.

In addition to this, if I take my laptop down to the basement "by" the router, I get great signal with no intermitent drops like I get while at the main level... so, yeah, it appears to be a matter of signal strength other than the fact that my wife's laptop (on which I am writing this post), has perfect signal from pretty much anywhere in the house... I am totally puzzled.

My next steps: I will test my laptop with a 3rd wireless USB adapter from D-Link, to change both the vendor and the form factor.  I will update as I unravel this mystery.