Intel Wireless 5100 AGN card XP problems

[IT_Man_Dan]

Morning all,

 

We've just bought alot of Dell Vostro 1520 laptops with Xp pro 32bit SP3 for all our staff with Intel 5100 AGN wireless cards on board.

 

First problem I noticed was that to get wireless N to connect in school on our (Linksys WAP4400N Business series Access points) we had to turn of the wireless card and then turn it back on for it to connect correctly, failing to do so would result in it hanging on Assigning Network Address.

After doing that it seems to connect no problem to the wireless N from then on.

 

Then we took one of the laptops off site to a normal home broadband connection using a SKY Sagem F@st router wireless G (I know they're rubbish but that's all we had!). The laptop would only connect when within 2 metres max of the router. Other peripherals using G connect to the router with no problems yet we can't get this one to play ball.

 

We've updated to the latest XP 32bit driver for the wireless card and am using windows to manage our wireless connections.

 

As you can imagine the brown smelly stuff has hit the air conditioning and we are panicking due to the fact that staff are expecting these to be ready yesterday....

 

Please help. Have any of you had this issue? It seems many people on the net seem to have the same problem.

 

Thanks in anticipation!

 

Dan

[sted]

yup the intel 5100 wireless card is utter pap. Sometimes flashing aps helps often it just wont reliably connect to anything

[IT_Man_Dan]

Ok,

 

We've opened up 1 of the laptops and there appears to be three antenna cables. 1 black, 1 white, and 1 grey. The grey one wasn't attached. Any one know what these different antennas are for? We tried unconnecting the white antenna cable and connecting the grey and it seems to be a bit more stable (at school, yet to try offsite).

[SYNACK]

Weird, we have a whole bunch of these cards in our machines that seem to go fine, hp 6730 s with Vista though so they may come properly connected out of the box.

 

The three antenna wires are for three seporate antennas, due to wireless N the MIMO (multi input multi output) approach uses differing signals from each antenna to get the cleanest signal possible by also grabbing reflected signals and also allowing for better control of the returning signal. Basiclly the N draft standard uses all three antennas and the card allows G to benifit from this as well.

 

I have seen this kind of thing before with alienware laptops which strangely had rubbich wireless signal. Opened them up only to find one antenna not connected at all, connected it up again and it was fine. This incompetence was evident on multiple machines - alienware (at least just after being taken over by Dell) are junk. I would suggest connecting all of the antennas and giving it another go.

 

If you brought them recently with Vista Business licenses then you may have the 7 upgrade avalible soon which may allow you to use the possibly much better drivers avalible to later windows versions.

Edited August 6, 2009 by SYNACK