WiFi continually dropping out

Bristolian

Bristolian

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Hi to all you exalted techno-wizzards out there, I'm in need of some help.

I have a HP G72 laptop ( not yet 3 years old) running Windows 7 (64 bit). It has a Qualcom Atheros AR9285 wifi adapter with the latest drivers installed. Some weeks ago it would lose connection to my wireless network in the house and this has been steadily getting more frequent ... and annoying. For the last couple of days it's gotten to the point where staying connected for 10 minutes at a time is rare.

At first I thought it was the VM Superhub and had VM replace two of them and an engineer to install the third (current) one. Trouble with blaming the SH is that swmbo isn't having any problems on her laptop or tablet and both our phones connect faultlessly. I've finally decided it aint the SH.

So, what else is it likely to be? Where do I start hunting this down?
 
Try changing the wireless channel and keep the SH away from cordless/wireless house phones.
 
admirable said:
Try changing the wireless channel and keep the SH away from cordless/wireless house phones.
Click to expand...

Hi Admirable, already ahead of you on that. Tried all the 2.4GHz channels - laptop doesn't support 5GHz - and used inSSIDer3 to find the best signal strength.

Cordless phone has been banished from the computer room, where the SH lives.
 
Bristolian said:
Hi Admirable, already ahead of you on that. Tried all the 2.4GHz channels - laptop doesn't support 5GHz - and used inSSIDer3 to find the best signal strength.

Cordless phone has been banished from the computer room, where the SH lives.
Click to expand...

One of my neighbour's router 'follows' me every time I change channel on 2.4ghz. Is that happening.?
 
Umm, had this problem, my netbook connects and stays connected faultlessly, our lasses Viao was always disconnecting, sometimes the "repair connection" would work, sometimes not, it might disconnect a dozen times a night.
It was a pain in my earole.
Anyway, turned out to be the encryption, I changed it to WEP from wap or something with a password of my choosing, not a code generated by the router and she hasn't had a disconnect since.
Maybe WEP encryption isn't as strong as Wap, I dunno, I don't care, the living room is a peaceful place once more...:)
 
It will be the superhub. Change settings so it is on a fixed channel and a fixed encryption method.

There's also some advanced settings that mean some cruddy compatibility modes are used. If above doesn't sort it then experiment with those.

Any auto settings seem to cause problems. Mine was godawful until I switched them all off and fixed everything.
 
Cheers for the suggestions folks, I have made some changes to the SH settings by replacing all the default or auto selections with specific ones. I'll see how it goes today.

Something I have discovered this morning is that if the laptop is in the same room as the SH then it doesn't drop out ... well it hasn't for the last half hour or so anyway :) I may have to look into relocating the SH into another room but as my main PC is hard wired that'll constrain where it can go.
 
I had this with my G62 HP Laptop, seemed to go away after I deleted the drivers and re-installed them.
 
Russ77 said:
I had this with my G62 HP Laptop, seemed to go away after I deleted the drivers and re-installed them.
Click to expand...

Hmm, that's an idea ... after all, what can go wrong :shrug:
 
Virgin SH here and it's just as bad. If you hard reset it (cable off, 30s, cable in) every 12h it becomes just manageable. A proper advice would be using it in modem mode and getting a decent wireless router. It is definitely not your PC, because then both of my macs, my ipad, and all android phones I've had are all faulty
 
daugirdas said:
Virgin SH here and it's just as bad. If you hard reset it (cable off, 30s, cable in) every 12h it becomes just manageable. A proper advice would be using it in modem mode and getting a decent wireless router. It is definitely not your PC, because then both of my macs, my ipad, and all android phones I've had are all faulty
Click to expand...

Have you fixed the settings away from the auto ones? Cured mine of unreliability instantly.
 
srichards said:
Have you fixed the settings away from the auto ones? Cured mine of unreliability instantly.
Click to expand...

All manual settings on mine, but it seems it still doesn't like it. The range is very poor beyond the same room.
 
daugirdas said:
All manual settings on mine, but it seems it still doesn't like it. The range is very poor beyond the same room.
Click to expand...

Mine is ok in most parts of the house. Surprisingly. I've got the sh2 though.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions folks :)

After changing all the auto and default settings manually and relocating the SH - within the same room but in a different place - I've finally got a stable and useable WiFi connection :clap:

I'm going to leave it like this for a couple of days and then try making a few more changes to the settings. Before I do though, can I expect to get a better signal by using dual channel?
 
Just a final (?) update on my problem.

As Russ77 suggested I deleted the drivers for the WiFi adaptor and forced Windows to re-install from the system partitiion on the hard drive - effectively resetting them to original. I then went to the Atheros web site and downloaded the latest version of the drivers. Since I installed these my WiFi connection has been much better and although still not perfect I can live with it.

Thanks to everyone that offered advice :)
 
Glad you got it sorted!

Just checked my wifi device and it's realtek although I had exactly the same symptoms as you, wonder if it's an HP build thing?
 
I had no end of issues with my WiFi, I had 4 neighbours who stupidly turn their routers off when they're not in, so my connection would randomly drop when they turned them back on and they auto-select my current WiFi channel....

I can see why BT added the utterly pointless "power save" (saves about 1watt) mode to their routers, people seem to assume that anything with a light uses HUGE amounts of electricity, but I guess "powersave" cuts the number of "my internet's not working" calls to BT support.

Then there was also some local company that used to drive about with adhoc WiFi networking kit on their vans, used to wipe out everyones WiFi whenever they drove past....

In the end I ripped up the lounge carpet and ran a Cat5 through my living room and upstairs. As more and more people start using it, WiFi is becoming less and less reliable.
 
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That's why I use mine only on 5ghz. None of the neighbours are on that at all. I also fix wifi channel so that it can't jump so everyone else's wifi has to work round me :)

I use ethernet as much as possible. It's only the phone and ipad on wifi.
 
Unfortunately, none of our equipment appears to work on 5GHz :(
 
Bristolian said:
Unfortunately, none of our equipment appears to work on 5GHz :(
Click to expand...
Yup... Most of the cheaper stuff is 2.4GHz only. I had to pay extra to get a 5GHz card in the Dell XPS we bought a couple of years ago - and that was nearly a £1k laptop.
 
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