DELL S-XPS16 has very bad reception

Hi. I got a DELL Studio XPS 16 a few weeks ago, which I needed for my year abroad. I have been using it and it is great apart from one annoying issue.

When i am close to a network, like 10ish meters away it conencts fine, but any further and it has severe problems. EG. i am using my roomates WiFi at the moment, and it is in his room about 15m away through two doors. I try and connect to it, and sometimes the router appears, and sometimes i doesnt. When i try and connect it either fails, or says "local only". When i am quite close to the router, it works. All my other roomates have no problem connecting to his WiFi and they are even further away. Even my Ipod Touch can connect to it fine!

I tried a similar thing in a local starbucks and could not connect to the wireless network there either. This problem occurs on BOTH Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux. I am wondering whether the antenna might be loose, or whether the network card may be broken altogether.

Anyone got any ideas_

 

That really sucks and I know how that feels. What wireless card is in it, and do you have the latest drivers installed? Don't check for the drivers from Dell or let windows try to figure it out for you. Find out what chipset the wireless card is running, made by either atheros, intel, ralink, broadcom, or marvell, and download the newest drives directly from the manufacturer's site.

 

I installed new drivers, but there has been no change. The card is a Intel WiFi Link 5100 AGN.

What is strange is when i refresh the Windows wireless network manager, the wifi netowkr i am trying to connect to appears at 4 bars, then will sometimes dissapear when i refresh it again, then come back, etc. It does this to all of the other networks that are around, most of which have either 0 or 2 bars.

I am thinking it might be a hardware issue as i have the same problem on both Windows and Linux.

 

yawn.

In the absence of a clearly seen hardware problem, poor wifi performance is most often the result of a dirty RF environment at 2.4 Gz and 5.0 Gz. The connect/disconnect symptoms you are describing are indicative of this.

With the number of consumer devices that run on those unlicensed frequency bands it's a miracle that 802.11 works at all. The Aussie engineers who originally thought up 802.11 did their job pretty well considering all that can go wrong.

You are going to have to troubleshoot the local environment. Take a survey of other WiFi devices, cordless phones, microwave ovens. And you are going to have to do this for a radius of 50-100 meters around your workspace(s).

Yes, I know that the Linksys and Dlink boxes say they support connections out to 100 meters. In the real world, 10-30 meters is more realistic with shorter distances very common.

 

Install Network Stumbler, select the WIFI network, then in options turn on MIDI sound. The strength of the network now is transposed into a tone. Move around and see what it does. Higher tone = more strength.