Verizon wireless modem/router

[Marcia]

Hi
Couple of things:
My friends switched from earthlink (EL) "high speed", set up with a modem, a Linksys wireless router for extra ports, one desktop using XP Home, one wireless laptop w/ XP Home, and two printers both hooked up to the desktop.
Everything worked okay except it was slow, so they switched to Verizon DSL and got a wireless modem/router from Verizon.

Now the wireless laptop has three problems:
- the laptop only gets a decent signal when it is in the same room w/ the modem/router. They have a tiny house and they are about 30 feet apart.
- the laptop can not print to the networked printers.
- Outlook Express only sends out emails when it wants to
After going thru all the resetting the router etc. and 2 hours of phone help, the Verizon tech told her to hook up a Linksys router they had hanging around and the situation did not improve. Is there any point at all in having the Linksys in the mix?

I got rid of EL so they could use verizon email and they are using the Verizon Security Suite.

Any ideas why the signal is so bad about 30 feet away, why the wireless laptop can't print, and the email is messed up?



Additional info: The laptop is a 2 year old low end Toshiba. The motherboard fried once already (according to the helpful tech staff at CCity) and the hard drive crashed.
Shortly thereafter the hard drive crashed again, and recently they had to "replace" the keyboard.
My friend really has no idea what happened, she is repeating what she understood the guy to say.
In spite of the extended warranty from CCity, CCity won't replace the piece of junk, and keep sending it out for days at a time to repair.

Do you think the laptop is hopeless and it's time to buy something decent? Or is it more likely set up that is causing the signal, email, and printer issues.

I hope that made some sense
Thank you for your time

[johnwill]

Please supply the following info, exact make and models of the equipment please.

Make and exact model of the broadband modem.
Make and exact model of the router.
Model numbers can usually be obtained from the label on the device.
Connection type, wired or wireless.
If wireless, encryption used, (none, WEP, WPA, or WPA2)
Make and model of your computer.
Version and patch level of Windows on all affected machines, i.e. XP-Home (or XP-Pro), SP1-SP2, Vista, etc.

Also, please give an exact description of your problem symptoms, including the exact text of any error messages.




On any problem computer, I'd also like to see this:

Hold the Windows key and press R, then type CMD to open a command prompt:

Type the following command:

IPCONFIG /ALL

Right click in the command window and choose Select All, then hit Enter.
Paste the results in a message here.

If you are on a machine with no network connection, use a floppy, USB disk, or a CD-RW disk to transfer a text file with the information to allow pasting it here.

[Marcia]

Great - thanks John
I'll get on it tomorrow