Windows 7 wireless drops

[purdon]

My wife's Windows XP laptop hard drive finally failed, so we bought her a new HP g60-630us, with a built in wireless adapter. Almost immediately there were issues:

1. Slow wireless network performance: Internet speed sites showed her machine to be 10x slower than my five-year-old HP pavilion zd7000 laptop. This was repaired by updating the wireless drivers (two upgrades were required to get it to current levels).

2. Intermittent connection loss: Her machine drops either the wireless connection and/or the internet at random intervals. Nothing to date has fixed this, though some of the things I have tried have made it slightly better:
a. Disabling power saving features for the computer.
b. Disabling power saving features in the wireless device driver.
c. Disabling IP6.
d. Disabling extraneous features from the wireless driver whose purpose seem to be IP6-related or device-discovery related.
e. Disabling DHCP, assigning a fixed IP address

When I look at her machine from the firewall, I see its name disappearing at intervals, unlike our two hardwired file servers or my own machine. Also, when pinging her machine I see terrible delays and lost packets, something I don't see when pinging our file servers:

Ping statistics for 192.168.1.80:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 94, Lost = 6 (6% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 3ms, Maximum = 136ms, Average = 14ms

This driving her crazy and she is making my life miserable. How do we fix her computer so it doesn't randomly drop?

 

[Crispy]

What type of router do you have?

 

[purdon]

Wireless router type

My wireless router and firewall is a Netgear WGR614 V7. I have been considering getting a "Windows 7" branded router, but I don't know why I should - such branding seems completely bogus to me. What's next, "Windows 7" branded electricity? And what happens if she wants to use this at Starbucks or the airport or at any of the thousands of access points available in the area we live in? It does not seem right to have to replace one's entire network infrastructure to accommodate a new PC, I thought that mentality went out with AppleTalk...

In any case, though I have not fixed the issue, I have managed a suitable workaround for home anyway. I pressed the little button to disable the onboard wireless adapter and then hooked up a Netgear WG602 v4 access point to the network port, which I had originally bought to give an internet-capable DVD player access. The moment I did this, all the problems went away.

Not only that, but I had recently bought a WD Sharespace file server to serve as a backup repository, and it had been having problems (shares kept disappearing from both of our laptops unless samba was restarted) which suddenly disappeared. Indications are that there were thousands of disconnects/reconnects from the Windows 7 machine until the WD Sharespace's samba service hung.


I don't know if it is a Windows 7 issue, a driver issue, or an adapter issue. I'm at the latest patch and driver versions. All I know is that it made my life a living hell for the past week,and it seems to me that any decent QA process would uncover it.

My wife is not feeling very happy about her Windows 7 experience to date...

 

[acurasd]

Easy Fix = Divorce (That solved a lot of my problems...) *lol*

Did you try to change some of the wireless channels? or at least force it to stay at a particular channel.

This is caused by alot of wireless signals nearby.


There are some routers (even devices) are not compatable with windows 7.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/buy/windows7-devices.aspx

You really think that your having issues with wireless...

Hunt down all the people having issues with IPv6 *lol* Homegroups.....It doesn't say on the box that all your computers must have Windows 7 for this to work. Your issue is just the tip of the ice berg but with every new OS that comes out. They want to push out these OS as quickly as possible and then start coming out with Service Packs to fix the major issues.

 

[Crispy]

It also depends on what channel your are on and what channel other people are on I was on channel 1 and next door is on channel 3 so it was colliding I changed my channel to 5 and central channel is now 7 and I got a boost in my signal by about 40%

 

[purdon]

Wireless channels

It's unlikely that it is the wireless channel, after all, the access point and my Windows XP laptop both use our router without issue. My feeling is that "changing the wireless channel" is something a phone support person would suggest to make the customer go away.

Our router's signal strength is excellent, and no other signal is as strong as ours, so it is unlikely to be the issue either.

It's been almost 10 hours without my wife's computer dropping off the network now.

As for the "incompatible devices" possibility, wireless routers conform to standards, just like TCP/IP. I expect any OS and drivers that are released by anyone to also conform to those standards, particularly laptops, which are portable and have the potential to connect to a lot of different wireless routers. If there is a compatibility issue, it's Windows 7 that's incompatible, not the router.

 

[chev65]

It's unlikely that it is the wireless channel, after all, the access point and my Windows XP laptop both use our router without issue. My feeling is that "changing the wireless channel" is something a phone support person would suggest to make the customer go away.

Our router's signal strength is excellent, and no other signal is as strong as ours, so it is unlikely to be the issue either.

It's been almost 10 hours without my wife's computer dropping off the network now.

As for the "incompatible devices" possibility, wireless routers conform to standards, just like TCP/IP. I expect any OS and drivers that are released by anyone to also conform to those standards, particularly laptops, which are portable and have the potential to connect to a lot of different wireless routers. If there is a compatibility issue, it's Windows 7 that's incompatible, not the router.

The facts are that Windows 7 is much more sensitive to channel crossover problems than Vista or XP. I have seen no less than twenty five different systems fixed by simply changing the channel in the routers control panel. Three in just this last week. Happens all the time.

I won't get into the fact that many different routers required a firmware update in order to function correctly with Windows 7. These types of problems are typical when a new Op system comes down the pipeline.

 

[Crispy]

According to the HP site this laptop only supports Windows XP: HP Pavilion zd7000 Notebook PC series- Download drivers and software - HP Business Support Center, but since you have Windows 7 installed already I dont see how it wouldn't work, also My wifes PC had the same probem as this she is using a TL-WN951N and the current driver was beta witch constantly had disconnecting issues and now they have released a non beta driver it works fine now.

 

[purdon]

wife's laptop is HP g60-630us

The wife's laptop (the one with the problems) is a HP g60-630us running windows 7. My laptop (no problems) is the hp pavilion zd7000, running XP.

 

[chev65]

The wife's laptop (the one with the problems) is a HP g60-630us running windows 7. My laptop (no problems) is the hp pavilion zd7000, running XP.

So the problem only occurs on one machine which would tend to point to a driver problem. I didn't realize it was only happening on one machine.

They show some Windows 7 drivers for your wife's laptop in the link below but I'm not sure if they are more recent that ones she is using now.

If she has the HP wireless assistant installed you should first uninstall it because it's been known to cause connection problems with Windows 7.

Direct link> HP G60-630US Wireless LAN WLAN WiFi Driver
Broadcom Wireless LAN Driver for Microsoft Windows 7

HP G60-630US Windows 7 Drivers & Software | Laptop Drivers Download

 

[Bill]

What type of encryption are you running? Have you tried changing it?

Bill

 

[neo101]

I too think 90% certain it's a borked driver or interference with it!
Try as many as you can! I use one from last summer on my system as it drops connections the least!

If she doesn't use LAN - disable it in device manager.

I think your Computer wireless card has a Broadcom chipset.
Look on the Broadcom site for latest Win 7 driver.

You must find out what chip it is to match driver!
Part# b/g speed - Broadcom BCM????

Broadcom.com - 802.11 Wireless LAN Solutions