Laptop won't connect to Access Point

Hi all! I've set up a router in access point mode in my home office, connected to the main router by ethernet, but cannot get one of my laptops to connect to it. My mobile and another laptop, fine; they even migrate/switch to the AP when I walk through to the office with them, but the one I definitely want to connect to the AP (as it's permanently in that part of the house), remains stubbornly connected to the main router, via 2.4GHz, yielding c2mbps, and regularly dropping connection.

What am I doing wrong?

Ta!

Rob

Edited by Robroadband (Fri 25-Apr-25 16:52:23)

Can said laptop ‘see’ the AP and just refuses to connect or can it not see it? What machine is it? What’s the AP?

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Can said laptop ‘see’ the AP and just refuses to connect or can it not see it? What machine is it? What’s the AP?

and what is the wifi network card in the laptop, does it have any updated drivers?

why would updated drivers allow it to see a radio that it currently cannot see,

you mean you think it can see an ap further away but cannot see the one next to it.

what is setting up a router in access point mode?????? a router is a router not an access point
what you are forgetting is channels look at which frequency the device is trying to connect to many look at standard ones and if they connect they happlily sit on that this is where your setup comes in to move the device on to a better connection.

In reply to a post by pyarwood:

what is setting up a router in access point mode?????? a router is a router not an access point

A home router contains both a router and an access point. If you disable its layer 3 features (in particular the DHCP server) and then plug into the LAN side, they you're just using the access point.

Channels *could* be the issue: if the regulatory domain is set wrongly on either the laptop or the AP, then the AP might be on a channel that the laptop won't use.

Encryption is another possibility - e.g. if the AP is set to permit WPA3 only, but the laptop only does WPA2 (or vice versa). However in my experience it's rare for devices to be set in a non-backwards-compatible mode.

Note that roaming between APs is the responsibility of the client, and some clients *do* stick to a weak signal even when a stronger one is available. If you turn wifi off and on on the laptop, does it still choose the weak AP?

Ideally what you want to do is to do a scan on the laptop, to list the nearby APs which it can see - individual APs with their MAC addresses (BSSID), not just the network names (ESSID). For a Windows laptop, I don't know how to do that. For a Mac you used to be able to run "airport -s" but it's been removed from recent versions of macOS.

Another approach would be temporarily to change the ESSID (network name) on the second AP, and see if the laptop (a) sees both ESSIDs, and (b) can connect to the second ESSID. This would show if the problem is to do with compatibility.

Hi Robroadband

as Pheasant and jchamier have already ask, what router are you using in the office and what laptop is it, idealy the sub version of the laptop as they can contain different wifi modules .. you can also just go into device manager - right click on the start menu and go to device manager and it will be under network adaptors

In reply to a post by pyarwood:

why would updated drivers allow it to see a radio that it currently cannot see,

its happened a few times with intel ..... for instance.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35199440

I would think that the first thing to try is to turn off the wireless on the router and see whether the laptop in question can connect to the internet and the router config page via the access point. That way, you make the question of whether the laptop can connect to the access point in the first place quite naked.