ubuysa
The BSOD Doctor
The Intel Centrino Wireless-N 135 in my Optimus IV has suffered from what seems to be a fairly common problem with Intel wireless cards; it randomly drops the connection and then reconnects again. On my Optimus it will do this only a couple of times a day but often it will do it two or three times in a row. I probably wouldn't have noticed except that we stream ClassicFM all day and we loose the connection when the wifi connection drops and reconnects.
Problems like this are a challenge and I have spent several hours trying all sorts of driver and setup combinations none of which have fully solved the problem. Some even made it worse, the latest driver from Intel causes my connection to drop and reconnect very frequently for example. Eventually I decided to investigate the advanced settings for the wireless card and I searched the Intel site for information on those settings that I was not familiar with. You can find general descriptions of these settings here.
I'm running Windows 8 and connecting to a Huawei MiFi with 3G mobile broadband access and two advanced settings really caught my eye: Roaming Aggressiveness and Transmit Power.
Roaming aggressiveness is described on the Intel site here. My card was set to Medium and I don't want it to roam at all, I want it to stay connected to the MiFi. So I changed this setting to Lowest which apparently stops it roaming at all.
Transmit Power does what it says on the tin, it controls the power the card uses to transmit, mine was set to Highest. I initially didn't pay much attention to this until I stumbled across Power Save Polling (PSP) on the Intel website. It says that if the router or access point you are connecting to does not support PSP you may experience loss of connection. Aha!
I haven't been able to find any info on PSP relating to the Huawei MiFi and I doubt that it supports it (there are certainly no settings to turn it on or off). Although a setting of Highest is supposed to turn PSP off in the Intel card the website does mention resetting it by setting a lower value and then returning it to Highest again. This I have done.
I did all that yesterday and since then the connection has not dropped. Of course this may not have fixed the problem (I'll post again if it doesn't) but I wanted to let everyone else experiencing this problem know about this so that you can check your wireless router for PSP support.
You can access the advanced settings for the card by clicking on Adapter Properties in the Network & Sharing Center, then right-click on your Intel wifi card and select Properties. On the dialog box that opens click the Configure button and then the Advanced tab on the new dialog box.
I'd be interested to know whether this works (or not) for anyone else?
Problems like this are a challenge and I have spent several hours trying all sorts of driver and setup combinations none of which have fully solved the problem. Some even made it worse, the latest driver from Intel causes my connection to drop and reconnect very frequently for example. Eventually I decided to investigate the advanced settings for the wireless card and I searched the Intel site for information on those settings that I was not familiar with. You can find general descriptions of these settings here.
I'm running Windows 8 and connecting to a Huawei MiFi with 3G mobile broadband access and two advanced settings really caught my eye: Roaming Aggressiveness and Transmit Power.
Roaming aggressiveness is described on the Intel site here. My card was set to Medium and I don't want it to roam at all, I want it to stay connected to the MiFi. So I changed this setting to Lowest which apparently stops it roaming at all.
Transmit Power does what it says on the tin, it controls the power the card uses to transmit, mine was set to Highest. I initially didn't pay much attention to this until I stumbled across Power Save Polling (PSP) on the Intel website. It says that if the router or access point you are connecting to does not support PSP you may experience loss of connection. Aha!
I haven't been able to find any info on PSP relating to the Huawei MiFi and I doubt that it supports it (there are certainly no settings to turn it on or off). Although a setting of Highest is supposed to turn PSP off in the Intel card the website does mention resetting it by setting a lower value and then returning it to Highest again. This I have done.
I did all that yesterday and since then the connection has not dropped. Of course this may not have fixed the problem (I'll post again if it doesn't) but I wanted to let everyone else experiencing this problem know about this so that you can check your wireless router for PSP support.
You can access the advanced settings for the card by clicking on Adapter Properties in the Network & Sharing Center, then right-click on your Intel wifi card and select Properties. On the dialog box that opens click the Configure button and then the Advanced tab on the new dialog box.
I'd be interested to know whether this works (or not) for anyone else?
