Multiple wireless routers on same SSID

Be polite? I don't follow. Was I rude?

The brand and models of the routers are irrelevant, as is the OS of the laptop. They are all windows, and the settings for the drivers are the same regardless of windows OS. Some wireless card drivers allow you to turn roaming, or searching for the best signal off, and others don't. The devices that let me do this have no problems at all connecting to the closest router and staying connected to it because I set roaming to disabled. The ones without the disable roaming (usually three or 4 setting, aggressive, moderate, conservative, and disabled. The router will jump to another SSID or channel when the signals are different. On aggressive it will change with only one or two bars signal strength difference, under conservative it waits till it's dang near lost signal to switch. Disabled won't switch till it looses the signal 100%) The reason the laptops try and connect to the far away access point is because they are picking access points based on bandwidth, NOT signal strength.

I already have a wireless repeater except better, it's a hard wired wireless access point. I have full B/G/N bandwidth from it. Repeaters waste a lot of bandwidth, and wouldn't work in my shop anyway. Besides, what good would a repeater do? The laptop is literally 10 feet away from the access point I want it to connect to, but defers to the one 100 meters away.

Turning one of the two wireless access points off is not an option. Why do you think I have two? Signal does not pass through about 20+ machines that are solid cast iron.

Anyway, I made a sort of rudimentary faraday cage from some brass shim stock. This blocks the signal of the second access point making it to the office, yet it still reaches where it needs to. Now the stupid laptop in the office doesn't try and connect to the access point with a mangled weak signal.

The only thing that would solve my problem would be a wireless configuration utility that has settings my drivers don't have. I always rob the drivers straight from the install and put them in manually using windows to manage networks. I despise the bloatware that is called third party wireless configuration utilities.

So, does anyone know of such an app?

I'm not sure if the wireless card in the laptop could be upgraded or not. It's sort of a bastard dell, bought with vista specifically for the serial port then downgraded to XP to run the transfer software for the machines. It's not a consumer level laptop to start with, so not sure how much I'd have to choose from for a new NIC. The guys walk it to machines to load things though, so it needs to swap SSIDs pretty fluently. I can't stand running over to make it reconnect 4 times a day!

I somewhat recently redid my network though, I have three routers now and all are dual band. Since I've updated all the routers to the same technology the rouge laptop seems to be doing much better. It still has odd glitches every now and again, like not being able to access shared files till you ping the host via IP. Think that might be a computer browser issue though. It always has internet at least, so I guess that's about all it could be. Easy BAT file made fixing that something anyone can do though, so I may just put it off indefinitely!

I have two SSIDS now though, across three routers. The 5g band is a separate SSID, and it doesn't do anywhere near as well in the shop (cnc machine shop 20+ high end Mazak lathes and mills) as I originally thought. All the office computers stay on the 5g, and anything that goes through the shop is 2.4 B/G/N. I don't see any problems with my phone swapping routers, and nobody has mentioned their phone not working either (though they may not even ask, they don't need it for work.) Hopefully you can run those tablets on the same SSID without issues!