Had a weird problem with my WiFi hookup at home. Some days I’d have perfect connectivity from the living room. Other days it’d be real spotty. The weird thing was that it wasn’t like I had a weak signal. The signal would go from 100% to 0% then back to 100% repeatedly about every 5 seconds. Of course, I ultimately fixed it by trying the obvious solution last. The solutions that did NOT work were disabling all of the cordless phones, adjusting the antennae, turning off WEP, etc. What did work was upgrading the driver on my laptop and the firmware on the access point.

And, the added bonus is that now the built-in wireless bells and whistles with XP are functional. XP keeps track of the wireless networks it has come across. You can configure WEP keys, passphrases, etc. and it keeps track of that hooha for you so can just go from wireless net to wireless net without having to remember the SSID for Starbuck’s or whathaveyou.