Broadcom Driver Issue

Just got my new 17 this week and was was having slowness issues with the Broadcom wireless adapter. After a bunch of searches, I found a suggestion to load the Lenovo drivers. That made the problem much worse (I can't even copy a file to my server over wireless even though it says the connection is fine).

I went to the Dell site to try to find the latest supported driver, but I cannot find anything (the only network or wireless drivers listed are the Broadcom BT driver and the Killer LAN drivers). Any idea how I get back to a driver that at least works a little? (working perfectly would be the ideal solution)

For the record, I also uninstalled the drivers entirely and tried the built in windows ones. Those would not even show available networks to connect to. The only ones I've been able to successfully find and install are the Lenovo drivers, but they don't work either (as described above).

I'm running Win7 64. The driver I have now (from Lenovo, that is not working) is 6.30.223.75 dated 4/26/13.

A link to any driver that works even a little bit would be awesome! I don't understand why I am having so much trouble finding a driver from Dell.

Additionally, I noticed the A08 bios is out. Mine came with A05. I normally don't like installing Bios updates unless it fixes something I know is broken (this may qualify). Any chances that may help my cause (or at least be worth it for other potential fixes)? The release notes don't say say anything about the Broadcom Card.

Thanks in advance for your help!!

 

What kind of router do you have?

 

I'm running a Netgear access point - WNAP210.

 

I belive the one on the Alienware website is the Wireless/Bluetooth driver in one so if you grab that one you should be fine. Make sure to remove that Lenovo driver completely first.

 

Update: I was able to uninstall the Lenovo drivers and installed the Wireless/Bluetooth driver from Dell. I had originally thought that driver was JUST for BT, but it updated both drivers. My connection is stable now but still really slow. I took the unit to a friends and was able to get a great connection and 10-12 MB/sec transfers to his LAN drive. It appears the issue is in my older access point hardware. Thank you for the help!

Looks like I'm in the market for a new router. Can anyone recommend one that works well with the Broadcom card? Ideally one that I can flash with DD-WRT?

 

Have you looked at the other thread floating around with Broadcom problems? it may not be your router, it is entirely possible that it is the wireless card. Some people listed off possible solutions that might make it better. I know that I have a few places I go where the router and the Broadcom card just don't get along, in particular my dads house has a Western Digital router and they don't like each other at all, I have to run a cable to get it stable if I want to game at all. The other option if you don't want to buy a new router is to pick up another wireless card you can find several variants that will work just fine and they are easy to change. There is an intel card ( I don't remember the model) that several people have been putting in their 17's and they have been working really good ( also supports AC)

 

Run a ping test @ Pingtest.net - The Global Broadband Quality Test or similar site and look at your packet loss as this could also be causing some issues. When I got my AW17 I was getting 2-3% packet loss over wifi and 0% when hardwired. After a good while playing around with the card settings I found that disabling WMM (device manager --> device properties --> advanced --> WMM --> disable) resolves the problem. I've had no adverse effects from disabling WMM either.

Im pretty sure I read on here a while back that Dell were in the process of releasing a driver to fix this but i'm not sure if this ever came out...?