Strange Network Problem

[kumduh]

I'm having a strange networking issue and I'm hoping someone can help.

So, here's the story:

About 3 weeks ago my brother's dog chewed through my 100ft ethernet cord, and since this has happened multiple times I decided to buy a cable crimper to fix all the old cords I have instead of spending $20 on a new cord. I fixed the cables, tested them with a line tester, and they all tested successfully. Since I needed something to act as a midpoint for the cords, and since I often have friends LAN in my room, I decided to use a Linksys WRT54G I had from my old house instead of just getting a cheap joiner. I had a small problem getting the Linksys to play nice with our 2wire gateway, but eventually solved the problem. I had a friend over and he was able to connect to the Linksys router with no problems, and the setup has worked perfectly fine ever since for me and anyone else connected via cable.... Until now.

The day my brother's dog chewed through the ethernet cord was also the day my brother left to go work a concert in Chicago, and he was gone until a few days ago. He came back with a new Toshiba laptop he bought while he was away, and now whenever he's connected wirelessly my connection drops pretty frequently. He hasn't had any drops or experienced any lag, and he isn't running any major downloads. When he isn't doing anything online, my connection goes back to being fine.

My connection is usually dropped for only 10 seconds or less, so I haven't had time to run over and check lights on anything. It has dropped in a variety of situations, sometimes when I'm playing WoW, and sometimes when I'm simply forum browsing and only have MMO-C + Ventrilo open, so I'm stumped.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[ispano]

First, don't use the linksys as you typically would. Turn off DHCP, and assign it a static IP address to it in the same range as your normal router, but not one it gives out for DHCP. Only use the switch ports. If you have DD-WRT(Don't remember off the top of my head if that model supports it) you can even turn the routing function off all together and use the WAN port as a 5th switch port. So basically it would function as a simple switch/AP and you won't have to deal with double NAT issues.

[kumduh]

Turning off the DHCP and using the router as a switch was the trouble I was referring to when I said "I had a small problem getting the Linksys to play nice with our 2wire gateway, but eventually solved the problem."

Sorry, I should have elaborated on that. I thought I configured it correctly since it's worked for 3 weeks, but here's a screenshot so you can tell me if I actually did it wrong: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images...sysconfig.png/