Serious wireless connection issues!

Hi I installed Windows 7 RC (build 7100) a few days ago with most of my drivers being installed by Windows automatically.

These weren't ideal so I installed the realtek HD audio sound driver designed for Vista 64, which is signed by Microsoft, and I haven't had any issues with it.

Then I installed the newest Nvidia drivers (185.85 WHQL for Windows 7 64-bit), with no problems. Now comes the problem.

Windows 7 installed a signed Broadcom 802.11g driver for my Buffalo WLI2-PCI-G54S wireless network card, but I looked for an official Buffalo driver, no luck. Nevermind I thought, it all seemed to work correctly with the Broadcom one. It now shows up as a Broadcom card in device manager, as shown here:



I was happy with this, until I tried to install Steam and play some Team Fortress 2. I noticed massive lag spikes whenever I moved my character, and fairly decent pings when I wasn't moving. So I brought up the in-game net graph (net_graph 3 in console). Here's a screenshot in motion:



(85ms on a server I play on a lot and normally max 50ms on. This happens on every server, and also in Day of Defeat Source, a game which runs on the same engine.)

Games aside, I decided to ping my default gateway, which is my router.


Not that great, but I've seen worse. I have seen much better pings (constant 1ms) from Windows XP 32-bit and Vista 32-bit using the official Buffalo drivers. No amount of antenna repositioning will help.

After some hunting on the net, I found 64-bit drivers intended for Vista, restarted the machine without enforcing driver signatures (these weren't signed for some reason) and through Device Manager, chose 'Update software', chose to manually find the drivers and pointed it towards the downloaded drivers. These installed after a few seconds and the name in Device Manager updated to be the 'Buffalo WLI2-PCI-G54S'. I restarted the system, choosing to disable integrity checks again. It connected to my network fine, pinged my router at mostly 1ms. Great, I thought. I started up TF2, and it had the same issue. Damn. Let's try DoD:S. Same issue. Argh. After 4 or 5 hours the driver also seems to stop working. It just refuses to connect to my network again without a restart. Device Manager reports the device as functional. So now I'm back with my Broadcom drivers for my Buffalo hardware trying to test my laggy games.


Can anyone help me out?

sorry yohan, but i believe you are in the same boat as alot of us i am afraid... all i can tell you now, which sounds horrible, but..... grab a paddle and start paddling with us. I have really no new ideas for this, which is even more frustrating to me. There should be about 10+ other threads on this same type of issue, just the past few days. I have found this bug to not discriminate against other adapters, its pretty widespread. I'm starting to believe this JUST isnt a driver issue, as it deals with many different adapters, wired and wireless. Its not even an x86 or x64 independant issue. So, welcome aboard, you wont find yourself alone on this one, by far.

Which problem is the widespread one? The dropping after so long? Or the terrible pings? Or..? :P

yohan said:

Which problem is the widespread one? The dropping after so long? Or the terrible pings? Or..? :P

dropping out... sometimes reconnects easily and fast, other times it wont, and either requires a removal of the adapter or a reboot... this pings you see, could be an independant issue there... i see 1's and 2's... 2's are nothing to even worry about anyways... just start worrying about that when you start seeing a spike up and down and timeouts/dropped packets.

OK thanks for clearing it up. I knew there'd be at least one issue when I installed the RC, there always is :P

Just posting to update you on what happened. Turns out I used my old config.cfg (TF2 User configuration file which includes variables like player name, as well as networking variables) from Windows XP, and Windows 7 doesn't like it. I deleted it, let the game create a new one and my lag issues are gone. Can't believe I didn't think of that. I'm now on wired anyway (but it fixed it on Wireless too.) To clarify, this was the configuration file's fault, not wireless/wired/Windows. Anyway, as well as this, a week later MS released new wireless AND wired drivers and things seem to be peachy.

Peace. :)