Low Wifi signal AOD250

Greetings from a complete newbie to netbooks. If you permit me,I would like to enlist your help with troubleshooting the wifi connectivity of my partner´s netbook. I have little information as we are 7000 miles apart and the wifi was supposed to be our medium of contact :cry: , but I will tell you what I know :

1. The AOD250 works perfectly with normal broadband.
2. It sees the available networks,but when trying to use one ,it returns the message of low signal strength
3. It has been tested in 2 or 3 different geographic locations with different routers all the same result.
4. In the open air with line of sight to where the common router is located same result.
5. he is using XP
6. other devices work fine from the same router,although not exactly in the same location.(boat marina)

I wonder if I could ask you to throw out some ideas as to where to look . He has had an IT guy look at the thing, but even he is scratching his head. I did look at other wifi connectivity issues on this forum,but none seem to relate to this model/problem.Many, many thanks in advance for your help .

 

Suggestions in order of preference:
1. Obtain and install a firmware upgrade for the router. One of my customers had a similar issue with his laptop and his home WiFi broadband that left me scratching my head as well. All other computers conected fine, but his BenQ laptop either got low/no signal strength once connected, or just wouldn't see the router. Firmware upgrade for the router took seconds, and permanently fixed the problem
2. Obtain and update the drivers for the WiFi card.
3. Check out the details for the WiFi card in the Device Manager, make sure it's not on any "power saving" settings, you want max throughput for the WiFi card.

Hope that helps

 

Thank you very much. It certainly does help . I hope to get some feedback in the next few days as to what ,if anything worked.