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.
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P
Paul
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.
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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
W
wasbit
If you really have flakey wifi, turn it off & use a USB dongle.
M
Marco Moock
Am 27.02.2025 09:49 Uhr schrieb micky:
Most likely. They could forge the device ID, but then the driver would have trouble operating the chip.
Realtek is a cheap mass product, but a reliable one.
P
Paul
They can make an adapter for $10 retail, with an actual RealTek chip inside it (not even an RF metal cover over the active circuits). Why would you need to make a fake ?
Any Wifi without a Bipolar PA after the MAC chip, we don't really know how long those will last. The companies that make the unreliable ones, certainly don't worry their pretty heads about failures. There is an issue with CMOS PAs losing the will to live after three months of operation, which could be an electromigration failure (high current, high temperature, high frequency). I would expect an Intel AX, the people making that should have some electromigration data to make a judgement on the wisdom of their design. Companies which are "fabless", less so.
It has also been noticed, that the output power level of cheap Wifi adapters, seems to vary a bit when they are brand new. If you bought two, one would reach the basement router, and the other would not. Then, after three months, there would be more separation in performance, between winners and losers.
We don't have a lot of sites now, to review these things for us. Some useful sites shut down. In one case, the guy doing the work, was getting sick of doing it :-) which is the best reason to quit, if you need to quit.
Paul
M
micky
That's what I've been doing, but those questions still interested me.
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