Two weeks ago, I installed a wireless connection on my laptop. The day I set things up, everything worked fine. I shut the system down and the next evening fired it up again to find that i have a connection to the wireless network with excellent signal strength except that it sends out packets but receives very little and wont connect to the Internet at all. I have tried all different kinds of settings but i am still not successful.
-- John Douglas

If you have access to a friend's access point, see if you can connect through it. If you can access the Internet through it, then that points your access point as being a problem. If you don't have access to another access point, there are still several things we can look at. Using the software that should have been supplied the wireless in the laptop to see if there is another access point nearby that could be causing the problem. Using a tool such as NetStumbler will help you identify the channel being used by both your Access Point and any others that are nearby. Ideally, you should only use either channel 1,6 or 11 in the US. These channels can be used at the same time without interfering with each other. If you see other AP's in use near you, NetStumbler will help you find a clear channel or at least one that isn't in use with as strong a signal as what you may be using now could be.

If you don't find any nearby access points the next thing is to turn the power off then on again on your current access point. Check the version of the firmware installed on your AP and compare that to what is currently available from the vendor's web site. If there is an update, download it and install. If a restart doesn't get thing back up and running, next look at the channel number currently being used. Most APs from the factory seem to default to channel 6. Try moving the AP to channel 1 or 11 (one of these make work better than the other).

If you still don't have any success, look for any wireless devices in the immediate area as your access point. You are specifically looking anything that is using the 2.4Ghz frequency range. What a lot of places where you can purchase wireless gear wont or don't know to tell you is that you may have problems getting WiFi to work in the presence of other equipment using the same frequencies as WiFi. This doesn't always happen in every case, but I have had it happen enough that this is one area that I look at closely when wireless not working cant be explained any other way.