On Thu, 2/27/2025 9:49 AM, micky wrote:
I've been having trouble with with the wifi receiver in my fairly old
Acer laptop**, but, showing good foresight, years before I had any
trouble, I bought a USB Wireless LAN card***
The LAN card is made in China by a company I've never heard of but its
entry in Device Manage says Realtek. Is it really Realtek? I see that
name a lot but now I"m not sure it's for real.
**For a couple years, the wireless would stop working after a couple
weeks, so I'd connect a cable, then a couple weeks later, that would
stop working so I'd disconnect it and use wifi. And on in on.
But in recent months, I used only the cable. Getting ready for a trip
to see my brother, I unplugged it and the wifi wouldn't connect. I ran
the troubleshooter and it said it couldn't find the problem, but it
would Reset and restart windows and that might help, and restarting is a nuisance but each time it did all of that, I worked. Five or 6 times
until I had sleep or hibernate. Then I had to start over with the troubleshooter. Any idea of how to fix this?.
***which may or may not be what's currently connecting versus the
built-in lan card.
services.msc : check "WLAN autoconfig" is running
Yes, RealTek is a major supplier of cheap networking devices.
A lot of builders use them. This one has two antennas. It has
a patch antenna on the other side of the PCB. And the rp-SMA
on the end accepts a screw-on plastic-stick antenna. That makes
it 2x2 MIMO, at a guess. Apparently the person who bought this,
paid $10 for it. Since he is taking it apart, I think you know
how well it works.
[Picture]
https://i.postimg.cc/hGjFnbDb/Real-Tek-Wifi-single-chip-two-antennas.jpg
Intel has also made it a point, to flood the market with "AX" models
of Wifi devices. The TPLink PCi Express cards I've got, underneath the
red tinted heatsink is an Intel module. TPLink does not have much work
to do, to prepare for one of those under their spiffy hidey hole.
(The heatsink only exists to hide what is underneath.)
The Intel one could be fitted to your laptop, in the connector
intended for a Wifi module. (Inside the laptop casing, generally
two tiny antenna cables which are easy to damage/squash while doing
the swapout.)
Some laptop firmwares are set up to reject modules that do not
meet the requirements of the "branding". But not a lot of laptops
still do things like that.
You don't want too aggressive a Wifi module, because of the potential for heat output.
The antennas run up the back of the panel, the panel can be plastic
so that the antenna signal escapes the plastic. The number of connectors
on the adapter card for inside the laptop should match the
number of antenna cables. Two antenna cables = two connector module.
The difference with an Intel, is you would get an Intel driver
for it.
All of them have to be compliant on channel assignment. When the driver installs, it takes the country it is currently operating in, into account.
It should not splatter outside the range of frequencies defined
for unlicensed operation. Maybe the router uses a certain channel
of a certain width, and then the module uses the same thing. If a channel
has too many users, you would change the channel.
On dual band adapters, there is 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz. 5GHz doesn't
penetrate walls quite as well, but at one time, the band was
less used. Then there was a tradeoff by selecting such a band.
And in the case of single chip adapters with the PA stage inside
the big chip, running the 5GHz PA might be pushing it. Some of the
single chip solutions, the PA weakens after 3 months.
The Wifi adapters are adaptive, and they will turn down the PA power
output, if the device is close to the router. Is that enough to
"preserve" the chip ? Hard to say.
It used to be, that the ENUM registry key, housed all the hardware info,
and deleting it, allowed hardware discovery to start over again.
This could clean up the driver situation a bit. But it would
not repair missing things, like if the WLAN autoconfig got
zapped somehow. A Repair Install can restore the WLAN Autoconfig,
But Repair installing is unlikely to clean up a really bad driver
mess made by the user.
Paul
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* Origin: A noiseless patient Spider (3:633/280.2@fidonet)
