Toshiba Notebook WLAN Issue - Updated

[Markbnj]

Hey guys, looking for some pointers here. I took delivery of a Toshiba P305 Satellite notebook today. It has an Intel WiFi 5100. Haven't popped a cover yet to get the actual model number, but it is supposed to be a/b/g/draft-n. The AP is a DLink DIR-655, with which we have had very good results in the couple of years we've had it. In addition to the new Toshiba there are four other WLAN clients in the house: three HP notebooks and an old desktop. The three notebooks can connect from pretty much anywhere in the yard.

I fired up the new unit tonight and tested the connection from my office where the AP is. Did some downloads at 1.5mbps+. Everything looked good. Walked fifty feet out to the gazebo and found I couldn't move packets at all. The adapter showed as connected, signal was poor to good, but pings returned destination host unreachable and everything else timed out. Started walking back toward the office and once I got into the kitchen, maybe 25 feet from the AP, it started working again.

I haven't messed with any of the advanced settings except to try turning rts/cts on, and enabling auto 20/40mhz bandwidth at the AP and client. Neither helped. I haven't tried setting specific channels yet, but just in general the peformance is so much worse than the three HP units that it seems anomalous. I had my daughter's HP in the gazebo right alongside this one, and could browse AT on it while the Toshiba timed out.

I don't want to string cat-5 down to the other end of the house for an extender (though I suppose I could), or trail fifty feet of it behind me when I want to work outside. The Toshiba is not returnable, so if there isn't some magic setting to improve this I could use some suggestions. Maybe a DLink CardBus draft-n adapter?

Thanks for any help.

 

[JackMDS]

I doubt that there is a magic Setting.

Since the other Wireless computers do well with the Router I would not mess with the Router.

Check the TCP/IP MTU and RCwin and optimize it according to the Internet Connection.

Check what running on the Laptop make sure that the Wireless is managed only with one utility.

Many Laptops are loaded with a lot of junk at StartUp try to clean some of it.

 

[Markbnj]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
I doubt that there is a magic Setting.

Since the other Wireless computers do well with the Router I would not mess with the Router.

Check the TCP/IP MTU and RCwin and optimize it according to the Internet Connection.

Check what running on the Laptop make sure that the Wireless is manged only with one utility.

Many Laptops are loaded with a lot of junk at StartUp try to clean some of it.

Thanks, Jack. Yeah, it is pretty well cleaned out, and as far as I know only the Intel drivers are running, along with Windows connection management stuff. Just strange that it would perform so poorly. I'll check the settings you mentioned and see if that helps.

 

[Markbnj]

Well, it just gets more frustrating, but maybe some additional details will trigger some ideas. I improved the router signal by relocating the AP to the middle of the house from my office, which is down at one end. Now I consistently have 4 or 5 bars (Very Good to Excellent) signal strength.

But the connection is still dog slow, both out to the WAN and hitting internal resources. The connection status shows rates as low as 1 MbPS, with the highest being one brief burst to 19. It seems to average around 2 to 5.5. Looking at the router it shows the client connected at a data rate of 1 MbPS with 18% signal strength. Meanwhile my daughter's machines on the second floor both show 54 MbPS at signal strength of 90-100%. One of them is a new HP latop, not sure what NIC it has. The other is an old desktop with a Belkin G adapter.

Ping tests from the troubled client to my office desktop and internal name server show times in the 1-2ms range, with occasional spikes to 50-75ms, and occasional lost packets. Comparitive ping tests from my desktop, which is wired to the router, show times under 1ms and no lost packets.

The client is a Toshiba P305-S8904 running Vista 64-bit, with the Intel 5100 WIFI Link NIC. The router is a DIR-655 set to accept g or n clients. I have downloaded and installed the latest Intel drivers without any change. Googling around shows a number of complaints of poor performance with this NIC in Vista 64, but the only concrete solution I saw was to put the NIC into Continuously Aware Mode by setting the power management strategy to maximum performance. I've done this, also with no change.

I haven't really configured the machine yet, so I am tempted to put either XP pro or Ubuntu on it to see if I get any better results. I may do that tonight, but any other ideas would be very welcome!

 

[JackMDS]

If it possible and you know how take one of the cards from another computer and try it on the Lame computer.

The more you talk about it the more it sounds like an hardware problem.

Could be bad card, bad Antenna, or something else in the Laptop.

Take the Laptop put it in the same room about 6 feet away from the Router, disable the Router's Security and give it a try.

If configured correctly Under such circumstances you should get the max. that the hardware can support.

 

[Markbnj]

I ran your experiment, Jack. In the family room, about 8-10 feet from the router, signal excellent, speed 78 MbPS. I walked out into the kitchen, about 8-10 feet and two walls further away, and the signal was excellent, but the speed had dropped to 39 MbPS. I kept going into my office, which is more or less the other end of the house from the router, perhaps 20 feet from the kitchen test, and 35 feet from the AP. The signal was good to very good, but the connection speed dropped to 1.0 MbPS. Within less than a minute it was showing limited connectivity.

The thing I don't get is that if the antenna were at fault, I'd expect to see a crappy signal. But there seems little doubt it isn't drivers or anything in the configuration, since it works at full speed when I get close.

 

[Markbnj]

Just to tie this off, I had no luck getting better performance out of the NIC under Vista 64. I pulled a copy of Windows XP off the shelf but the install BSOD'd twice in a row. So I downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 and burned a live-cd. Booted that and it came up fine, detected the NIC (I had disabled the wired LAN port in the BIOS), and connected to the AP when I provided the WPA creds. Ping times were all over the place, from 5ms to 60 or 70ms. No lost packets from my office, which was better than under Vista last night, however connection speed was very slow. Like four minutes to load the Google page. I moved around the house and out onto the deck, and immediately started dropping packets and then lost the connection. Signal strength never dropped below 60%. Boxed it up, and will be calling Newegg for an RMA on Monday.

Looking on Newegg I see that the laptop is now listed as "deactivated item", whatever that means. The return policy on this unit is replacement-only, so it will be interesting to see what they tell me.