New
#1
Wireless adapter cuts out on 5G band only
Recently I built a Win7 Pro desktop machine (the one in my specs), and while most of the hardware was Win7-compatible (initial USB issues aside), the mobo's wireless card was not. So I ended up getting this: TP-LINK Archer T3U AC1300 Mini Wireless - Micro Center . It's been working beautifully... when it wants to work at all.
When I first installed it, I tried connecting to the 5G band on my router, but it didn't work at first. No helpful message - the OS just said it couldn't connect. Eventually I tried my 2.4G band, that connected normally, and then I switched over to the 5G band and it worked. I thought it was weird, but didn't think anything of it beyond that.
A few days later, I notice the adapter is cutting out every so often. Not like a bad signal, or dropping the connection and then picking it up again - I'll go from a quick ping straight to nothing, and it doesn't recover. The network status just shows as disconnected (red X), with no wireless networks available, until I restart the adapter.
Even then, restarting the adapter only succeeds maybe 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time, things get weird. The adapter won't show as disabled until I refresh the adapters screen, and then when I try to enable, it sits at "Enabling..." indefinitely. Killing/restarting explorer doesn't help. Even if I try to reboot, it sits on the shutting down screen indefinitely until I hard reboot. The device is still seen in device manager without any errors/warnings, although the link light is off on the physical device. After the hard reboot, everything's fine for awhile until it happens again. I can't find anything in the event logs which might explain the problem.
One day last week, I noticed it would consistently cut out every time I was trying to download or stream something of any significant size (in this case, a new GPU driver). That day, it was cooperating with my disable/re-enable without rebooting, but each time I'd try to restart the driver download and it would cut out again, pretty reliably around 20-30%.
So I decided I'd switch it back to my 2.4G band and see how the performance was. But it's behaving weirdly there as well. When it's connected to 5G, all it pulls up are a small selection of networks in my area, which excludes my 2.4G band (I theorize the ones it can find are 5G). I had to uninstall the driver both from device manager and run the TP-Link uninstaller before it would find the 2.4G band again after reinstalling. If I tried only one of the two, even the freshly reinstalled one would only find 5G networks.
Eventually I got it connected to the 2.4G band using the above method, and while understandably it was slower, the download did finish and I've been downloading/streaming other stuff for a good week now with no issues. Not a single disconnect when it's on the 2.4G band.
So I really want to use this thing at modern speeds, but what could be the problem with it?
A few more tidbits which might help rule out things:
- No other device on my network has issues like this, either older devices on the 2.4 or modern devices on the 5. If I run another device (say, my phone) in the same general area / distance from router as this desktop, that device doesn't cut out.
- I do have modded USB drivers (obtained from this thread/page: Update your Win 7 installation media ), which were needed to get the OS installed. I don't believe these drivers are at fault, though, because otherwise why would the 2.4G band work?
- I have not installed any Windows updates aside from the Simplix update pack. I'm open to installing an update if it directly relates to this kind of issue (which seems unlikely). I do not want to install all available updates, for several reasons.
- The router is a Trendnet device from around late 2013, self-bought. Had no issues with it before, except it was fairly stupid when I tried to hook up an external HDD to it (I kept seeing events from bowser saying it was trying to conflict with the desktop machine, so I took out the external drive to rule that out as the cause). I'm open to replacing the router, but only if I can conclusively determine that it's at fault (since no other device is having the issue).
- The NIC is brand new, is connected to a USB3.0 port, and it has a good signal at all times when it's working. I've ruled out low signal strength issues because the connection never slows down, it just cuts out (tested with continuous pings both to the router and external sites). I'd really rather not replace it if possible - for one thing, TP-Link's driver software just installed without any fuss, didn't bring any bloatware with it, and it works through the OS's connection interface rather than some TP-Link software, which I really appreciate.
- I have installed the latest driver from TP-Link, to no effect - including removing all program files from the old driver. Also checked the registry but I didn't see anything there.
Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.
Quote