Issue with wireless adapter

Hey all

I am having some trouble with wifi in general on my AW17. The adapter is a Killer 1202.

The laptop shipped with Windows 7 64 bit and to the best of my knowledge (I only used it 4 days before formatting it) wifi was working fine.

I have now deployed Windows 8.1 on it and installed all drivers from Dell's website. Latest wifi driver on the website is 10.0.0.276

The problem is when I connect on the 5Ghz band the signal is very very inconsistent. I sit exactly 4 meters away from my cisco/linksys router. Signal drops from 5 full bars to 3 at times. And worse of all, I frequently lose completely the signal for 2-3 seconds before connection is up again. Also I was expecting performance to be on par with the performance I get with the external adapter I use on my old laptop. As a test I tried copying some files from my laptop to my WD Live box. Using the adapter, transfer speed is between 11 and 13MB/s, while on the AW I get 8-9MB/s.

The 2.4Ghz band is a bit better, I always get 5 bars but I still do lose the signal completely from time to time.

I managed to find some generic Atheros drivers which I successfully installed (10.0.0.288) but things didn't improve one bit...

Am I missing something? Is there any setting/option I need to activate from the Killer's options or from device manager?

 

This is a known issue, Win 8 has a driver issue. There is a big thread on the main forum with various solutions people have tried and tested.

Read here http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...thread-look-solutions-ask-questions-here.html

 

You rock bro!

Found the solution in the post you pointed me to.

For anyone curious to know what the fix was:

I'm using Windows 8.1:
Go to your Network Connections:
Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections
Right Click on WiFi -> Properties -> Configure -> Driver Tab -> Update Driver
Click Browse my Computer -> Let me pick -> Uncheck "Show compatible hardware"

Qualcomm Atheros Communications should be highlighted under Manufacturer
On the right side under Network Adapter find exactly and click on: "Qualcomm Atheros Wireless Network Adapter"
Click Next and install it.

 

thanks for sharing the solution with the community. @OP, give that a try and let us know.