PCA Forums

Seems to be a major problem. Lots of people bitching on the forums.

The Intel 5100 AGN is a really popular WLAN card that comes in a lot of laptops. It worked fine under Vista but it seems to have packet loss issues when connecting to certain routers (the DLink DI-624 for example and some of the newer Linksys "door-stop" shaped routers).

Packet loss is so bad it's almost unusable on an unencrypted connection, and with encryption it usually won't even connect.

It's only a few routers it has an issue with and I've been carrying around a Dlink USB WLAN stick to work around this for now. I've tried a variety of drivers and other suggestions but it looks like I'm just going to have to replace the internal WLAN card since Intel is oblivious.

This is similar to the issues that Intel had with their popular but crappy 2200 G WLAN card a few years back.

FOLLOWUP: Most of the drivers I tried didn't help but the latest Intel driver from their website (v13.2.1.0 dated 5/31/10) seems to have fixed the problem. Just don't rely on Windows 7 to aquire the proper driver because it won't - not yet anyway.

I seem to vaguely recall having run into this at my old job and I don't remember what I ended up doing to resolve the issue. But it's nice to know there is a fix out there.

eGo

It's actually an issue with the routers. They are not properly implementing Power Save Polling (PSP) mode. Intel's only recommendation in their KB article is to upgrade the firmware of the router or disable PSP mode on the NIC. Trouble is, the settings they give you to disable it don't exist on any driver I've installed (and I've installed several from Intel, Acer, and the default Win7 drivers).

After I installed that May Intel driver, I tried the laptop at one of the locations that was giving me problems that had a DLink DI-624 router (known to have this issue) and it worked fine.