Ok, I do it too , but I didn't think it necessary to impress everyone with my technical prowess. The OP states that it's his router, so he's in control of it and its settings, and that his roommate can see a bunch of networks that he can't.

So, either it's a simple problem (wifi turned off) or it's broken. Looking for more complexity is counterproductive.

It is true that there are many other possibile causes, but their likelihood is vanishingly small. In addition I have two of these, they always work (one is XP, one is Linux), and I have used them on many networks as I move around (between cities I mean, not just to the next room). If I had only one of them, and it was the faulty one, then it would have been trickier to determine where the fault lay. The fact that I had two made it simpler. The fact that the OP's roommate has a wifi-enabled laptop which is working in the same environment gives credence to the idea that something simple and obvious is wrong, and it's not subtle and arcane.

A