XP T60 randomly stops seeing my wifi network.

[Glaurung-quena]

Every so often, I run into a problem where from one reboot to the next, a T60 (running XP) would suddenly stop being able to see my wifi network. It would still see the networks of my neighbours with extremely weak signals, but not the network whose router was six feet away. Rebooting usually caused it to regain its sanity.

Now today, neither of the two T60's I'm refurbishing will deign to see my home network, even after several reboots. What they do see is a limited selection (maybe eight?) of the two dozen networks detectable from my house. Each time they see a different assortment of those networks. As usual, I installed XP on these T60's from factory restore disks.

I just confirmed that the T41 I finished working on this week CAN see my home network just fine, so it's not that my router has stopped sending out signals compatible with these 20 year old computers.

I have an IOT device in my basement (smart monitor for my solar panels), which has its own wifi network for some reason. Sometimes that network will show up in the list, sometimes it doesn't. What doesn't show up is my home network.

It's like either the laptop or XP suddenly ceases to be able to grok more than a handful of networks at a time, and rather than list the ones with the strongest signals, it lists a random assortment of them.

[TPFanatic]

im curious if Thinkvantage access connections software may give any better performance.

Can always run a live linux and see if they behave better than XP.

[Glaurung-quena]

im curious if Thinkvantage access connections software may give any better performance.

Can always run a live linux and see if they behave better than XP.

Part of refurbing them involves restoring them to factory default software, which includes access connections.

It's not just XP vs non XP, as the T41 is also running factory default XP, and it sees the network just fine.

[TPFanatic]

Sounds like you’ve done everything right. Must be satan hiding your home wifi from your T60

[dcfbf]

Try updating the wifi drivers and updating to SP3. IIRC SP2 doesn't support WPA2 very well and the drivers that came with the T60 restore disks were not great.

If that doesn't work...Maybe check the wifi cards in them?
Perhaps a specific wifi card is being especially temperamental with your wifi router.

[Glaurung-quena]

I am a complete idiot. Updating the wifi driver enabled it to see the network again.

Updating the driver on a T60 was never necessary before with my -N router, but now I have a new ISP and much newer -AC router, and evidently for some unknown reason, said router is invisible to older devices unless they have the latest driver installed. The T41 had the driver updated because that has always been necessary in order to connect to WPA2 networks, hence it was able to see the new router.