I've been using my wireless router for three years and it worked fine until recently. Now most of the time it still works fine but the following problem happens once or twice each week, sometimes in the day time, sometimes at night.
My dell inspiron 8600 laptop,which uses a pentium M CPU and dell wireless card, still shows strong wireless signal but does not have internet connection. My roommate's dell laptop, which uses centrino CPU, can not detect the wireless signal and does not have the internet connection either (although her laptop can detect more neighboring networks than my laptop). However if my laptop is connected to the router by cable, her laptop can recover our wireless signal and internet connection at the same time. And if I unplug the cable, her laptop loses the wireless signal and connection at the same time.
Again the problem does NOT happen all the time, most of the time both of us can just use the wireless with no problem. The problem could happen in a afternoon and disappear the next day without me doing anything to the router.
Does anyone know what's the problem? would a new router solve the problem?
Thanks for the help!