WiFi issue with set of Dell laptops

[sluggster66]

Weird one I have a set of Dell latitude laptops that either keep dropping off the WiFi or won’t auto connect at startup.

 

Doesn’t happens at the same time on all laptops, a restart of the WiFi adapter connects the laptop.

 

The WiFi is unifi.

 

Things I have tried:

1. Update drivers

2. Turn off allow device to turn off adapter

3. Tested on another (Cisco) WiFi, same issue

 

Any ideas would be great

[Ditto]

Sorry I don't have a strong answer, but I had a small experience of this. We found powering off/on the AP's resolved, but that's not satisfactorily. What I did learn is that often the wifi hardware in the same model of Dell did vary, and along with that reliability of keeping connection of switching to different APs when moving the laptop around the site. Might be worth searching the Edugeelk site, as I think this topic has cropped up before.

[6Foot2]

BIOS update?

[atcoates]

Might be worth a visit here to see if there are any more recent updates, Dell push out a lot of updates https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-uk//Products?app=drivers

[synaesthesia]

We had a very similar issue when putting in our new Aruba wireless system, and the issue turned out to be firmware on the AP's themselves. We'd gotten around it temporarily by forcing the laptops (via drivers) to connect to 5Ghz only as for whatever reason 2.4 wasn't playing ball in exactly the same way as you describe.

[sluggster66]

Thanks guys, I have done most of these but will take a peak at the 5ghz

[sluggster66]

The adapter does not support 5ghz.

 

The issue happens on any WiFi network, so tested on Cisco, unifi and BT home hub

[ticktock]

What kind of adaptor is it in the laptop? A few years back I had terrible trouble with Atheros adaptors. I had to find a very specific driver release that fixed a similar issue. I was at the point of buying small usb wifi adaptors before I found the fix.

[DrBeaker]

What kind of adaptor is it in the laptop? A few years back I had terrible trouble with Atheros adaptors. I had to find a very specific driver release that fixed a similar issue. I was at the point of buying small usb wifi adaptors before I found the fix.

This.

 

We had very similar with random wireless dropouts of the wireless on Fujitsu laptops years ago.

 

Turned out to be driver issues, install a very specific driver version from Intel and it worked.

 

Might save you the 6x months of stress, pain and hair-pulling I had until I fixed this (the senior techs and manager etc had given up).

[Ditto]

I think the last two posts are on to something. I do recall Atheros adaptors being in the equation when we hit issues.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

What model are these?

 

We've seen occurrences of this problem with Dell Latitudes using Broadcom WiFi cards.

It's not every card but some Broadcom cards do not play ball after a while.

 

We've not yet found a perfect fix other than to switch the card out for an Intel one.

[ricki]

Hi Last year I had a problem with some dell laptop and I had to install the latest driver and disable power management and set them to 2.4ghz only and it fixed the problem with them.