Wireless Test?

[Gongalong]

Hi folks,

 

I've got a laptop with a purported misbehaving wireless card - apparently it disconnects from the network randomly.

 

Can anyone recommend a Windows utility that will keep tabs on whether the wireless card is connected over a period of say several hours, and report back on whether there have been any connection failures? A wireless card "stress tester" or similar I guess.

 

TIA

[DT2]

Have you checked the default power settings on the NIC?

Most are set to turn off wireless to save power.

 

DT

[Gongalong]

Not specifically, but the user is mid-use when the connection stops. She's getting this both in-school and at home, and yet other kit at home is perfectly happy and not disconnecting. The laptop in question is a Tosh Satellite Pro, and we've had to repair 3 others which have had faulty internal wi-fi cards (fortunately we have a few spares which have been cannibalised).

 

I would like to be able to run an overnight stress test though just to demonstrate that it's faulty, because it's an intermittent fault.

[6Foot2]

What is the client O/S?

 

I ask because we used to have this with some of our XP laptops. We eventually found that we could make them work more reliably by switching off the Dell/Broadcom wireless utility managing the wireless card and always use Windows to manage the card.

 

Other [non-Dell] wireless card utilities might give the same problems?

 

Perhaps?

 

Just a thought.

[Gongalong]

It's Win 7. We've reinstalled this particular laptop from scratch with Win 7, so it's using the built-in Windows wireless tool.

 

Someone else has suggested Netstress, so I'm going to give it a go.

[TheMinister]

You could always run a script to ping your gateway once a second and log it to a file on the laptop.

 

Log date and time - when it drops out, check the event viewer to see whats wrong.