Windows 7 wireless signal issue

Yet another Windows 7 thread here...

I installed Windows 7 Professional on my laptop recently. All is going well except for one thing, my wireless reception is rubbish. Right now I'm about 1.5m away from my router with no obstructions and the signal is at 4/5. That's not a major issue, but when I was at my brother's house I was getting a fluctuating signal of between 3/5 and 1/5 (with poor performance) while his laptop which was right beside mine had a full signal - both laptops have the same wireless LAN adapter. The router would have been about 3m away though behind a wall. When running XP both scenarios mentioned above gave me a full 5/5 signal.

My laptop has an Intel 4965AGN wireless adapter and I tried the drivers released by Intel on 7's launch day but they didn't help at all. Any ideas?

pcman

Connection strenght will vary depending on what router and what config you have

some of the variables are

1. wireless channel (1-11) can be set on both the router and card
2. Wireless technology (A,B,G,N)
3. power management
4. roaming agressivness
the list goes on

it could simply be that you have a better router than your brother

I have a 5 GHz router on channel 48 but that's besides the point. Windows XP works fine in either situation - it's only since I installed Windows 7 that I've had this particular problem. The range seems to be greatly reduced.

Soundman

Have you got the correct and most up to date driver installed for your wireless network adapter?

Edit: I have the same adapter in my laptop. Latest driver seems to be:

Driver Date - 26/03/2009
Driver Version - 12.4.1.4

What version are you on if you look in your device manager?

phill106

one other possible issue is perhaps one of the 2 antenna wires for the intergrated wifi card has become loose. Should be a panel similar to memory access panel at base of laptop. Or you could rule out a hardware issue by booting off a ubuntu cd and seeing how it picks up the wifi strength.

Capt'n Midnight

if the problem only occurs since windows 7 install then it's most likely to be a software setting and I'd say power saving is the main one to check

5 GHz so unlikely to be someone else near by, and if there is you should pick up the name in windows, and all you'd have to do is change channel.

kenon

I installed Windows 7 on a laptop and I also noticed the wireless signal wasn't as strong as it was on XP. I had two laptops side by side, one with XP and one with 7. The XP one found the router and connected whereas the 7 one couldn't find the network or it found it intermittently with poor signal.

It was the most up to date driver aswel. Infact, I got better performance from the old driver than with the new one so I'm fairly sure its got something to do with the driver but I haven't been able to fix it. Its a Dell 1390 802.11g Mini Wireless Card.

cpu-dude

Karsini wrote: »

I have a 5 GHz router on channel 48 but that's besides the point. Windows XP works fine in either situation - it's only since I installed Windows 7 that I've had this particular problem. The range seems to be greatly reduced.

Unistall the drivers and connect to your router with the LAN cable, then run Windows Update and let it install the drivers for you.

Soundman

Soundman wrote: »

Have you got the correct and most up to date driver installed for your wireless network adapter?

Edit: I have the same adapter in my laptop. Latest driver seems to be:

Driver Date - 26/03/2009
Driver Version - 12.4.1.4

What version are you on if you look in your device manager?

I had the same driver, it's the one which is bundled with Windows 7. Intel also released a newer driver on Windows 7's launch day but this did the same thing. I also checked the power management setting for the wireless in the power options but it was set to maximum performance. As a test I just tried installing the 64-bit XP driver and it seems to be working but it's too early to say if using an XP driver has caused any other problems.