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Mending the wireless

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 11:31

Paul Ockenden offers a number of suggestions to help cure a flaky Wi-Fi network, from the free to the rather expensive.

For Windows users (Linux users will probably already know about updating drivers) wanting to update your wireless card drivers, go into Device Manager and right-click on the wireless card, then select its Driver tab from where you'll find the version number and release date of your current driver. There are three places where you might find updated drivers, the first being via Microsoft's Windows Update, where it will probably be marked as an "optional" update and so won't get installed automatically - you'll need to manually choose it. The second place to look is on your laptop manufacturer's website, within the downloads section. In Dave's case, with his Dell laptop, the place to start is http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads. The third place to look is with the actual manufacturer of your wireless card. Usually a Dell will contain a WLAN card that's a rebadged version of someone else's hardware, and sometimes that original manufacturer's drivers will be better, although my advice to Dave would be to stick with the latest drivers from the Dell site. The same goes for the wireless card firmware: if there's an update available, you'll find it on the Dell website.

It's amazing what a difference firmware and driver updates can make: while they probably won't extend the range of the wireless LAN, they may improve throughput and reduce the frequency of dropouts you experience at the extreme edges of the WLAN where signal strength is marginal.

A slightly more radical option is to swap the WLAN card inside your laptop for a different make. What a lot of people don't realise is that their wireless modem or router usually contains either a small WLAN card just like the one inside their laptop or Cardbus WLAN adapter. If you can discover the particular make of card and/or chipset that's used in your router, you might be able to obtain a card that uses the same chipset to put in your laptop. Check vendors such as OxfordTEC (www.oxfordtec.com/uk), which usually keep a range of cards with various chipsets in stock. During the testing I've been doing recently, I've discovered that having the same chipset at each end of a WLAN connection can make a huge difference to its performance, and I reckon that's why in various magazines' comparative tests of wireless kit you'll often see different kit being declared as the fastest. I reckon that to a large extent the results of these tests depend on the client adapter being used in the test laptop so, for example, if the tester's laptop contains a Ralink or Atheros-based WLAN card then routers and modems with matching wireless subsystems will probably come out on top. I'm not sure what the answer to this problem is, since testing using every possible combination of chipsets isn't a realistic option, but please do bear this chipset conundrum in mind whenever you read comparative reviews of wireless kit.

If none of the above tips has worked, my final tip is to try installing better antennae inside your laptop, or even to use an external aerial, although some people might see this latter idea as one kludge too far. Replacing the internal aerials is fairly easy: once again, look to firms such as OxfordTEC, or do a hunt on eBay where you'll find several people selling replacement aerials. If you buy short-ish antennae you'll probably be able to avoid completely removing the baseplate of your laptop, because as they're well insulated I've found you can usually just feed them through gaps around where the WLAN card sits. Just make sure that each replacement aerial points off in a different direction to maximise the performance.

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