Wireless internet woes

[Calibre]

I'm hoping for people in the know, this'll be a pretty easy question.

In our house we use a wireless router connected through cable with one PC, one laptop and 2 PS3's.  All receiving internet wirelessly.  My internet works fine with wireless and works when my PS3 is downloading or my brothers PS3 is downloading / playing online but the second he connects his laptop to our wireless network my wireless breaks instantly 100% of the time.  As soon as he disconnects it works again 100% of the time.

If I have a wire in whilst he's online that works but my mother seems to not like the massive blue wire flowing through the lounge.  Is this something so with opening ports - not that I know what that means?

 

[hungery12]

thats wierd,
usually, we can have all three laptops, the 360, and two DSs.
All online and everything.
maybe your router just sucks.

 

[Tdata]

Are you using Static IPs?  If so, you may be trying to use the same IP settings...  I have 3 PS3s, 2 Xbox360s, 10 PSPs, and 20 computers hooked up to one wireless router...

 

[Calibre]

Thanks for responding... I don't know though, I'm not very techy when it comes to hardware etc

How Do I check if I am and how do I resolve it?

 

[arcthemonkey]

Another thing it could be is if the laptop has a poorly configured copy of Norton's installed. Norton's being set up wrong is the only thing I've seen personally that can shut down an entire network like that.

 

[___]

You can check whether you're on static IP on either machine by going to Control Panel->Network Connections, right click on your wireless connection, select properties, select TCP/IP protocol in the window that pops up and select properties on that.  In the resulting window you will either have everything set to auto or there will be values filled in in the boxes.  If there are values in there, you are static; otherwise you're dynamic.

If you can connect via cable though most likely that is not your problem.

 

[Calibre]

There are no values so I guess I must be dynamic.  Oddly enough it's been working the past few days without much of a problem.

I'm not sure if my brother has a Norton on there, he's not here at the moment but I'll be sure to ask him.

Thanks.

 

[Cmitch1120]

Weird... I had the same problem only with my DS Lite as the culprit. Then I plugged in this DS Memory Booster (for internet on DS browser) and now it works fine, too. Oh well, technology is amazing when it works.