Wifi drops when I close the lid?

Kind of a weird thing, when I close the lid to my r1 the wifi looses connection. I have "closing lid to do nothing" but my wifi drops. To check to see if it had something to do with the wifi card turning off when the lid shuts I put a small magnet from one of my spare screens on the pickup point on the bottom right corner of my palm rest (simulates screen being closed) after leaving it for a little while I removed the magnet and wifi is still connected....

So it seems that only if I close the lid the signal is dropped. This has always happened, even before my hinges were replaced a few months back.

Anyone else have this problem?

 

Can't say I've ever seen anyone report that here. There aren't any power options that would do that either.

Even though it was happening before your LCD assembly replacement, is there any chance that the aerials are routed incorrectly and are being pinched?

 

I notice the signal drops by a bar on mine, but I do have full signal next to the huge antenna for my router.
It's because of the way the antenna are routed in the lid, they work much better when it's open as you'd expect.

 

I checked that when I repasted last month, everything is routed good in there.

I have read about it being a problem on some macbooks, but never seen it in one of these things. Funny thing about it, my first r1 did it, then the replacement did it, I got a new screen and it still did it, then got another new screen and it still did it... I just assumed it was normal, but its a pain in the butt when I want to close the lid at home and stream hulu on it.

 

Hmmm... My R2 hasn't ever done that. I feed my TV NAS hosted videos over wifi with the lid closed every day. I'm also closing my lid 2 or 3 times a day at work (set to 'do nothing') and I've never had it drop a connection.

Does the connection drop only when it's 100% closed? 90% closed?

Is it connections to all WAPs or just one in particular?

Seems we'd have heard about this a long time ago if it was some setting or 'feature'.

 

Considering I think the wireless antennae goes through to the top of the screen (someone double check me) it could be that something is clipping the wire? Just a thought. Might be completely off-base of course. First time I've heard of this. Best of luck to you.

 

Someone once said, "Good science is good observation". So here I am... doing science.

Connected my M11xR1 up to the TV via HDMI with inSIDDer running and WiFi enabled.

Closed lid and signal decreases a few db. Opened lid and signal increased.

What can I say.

Blue line indicates the WiFi SSID I was connected to.

The red line on each side of the graph indicate when I closed and then opened the M11xR1 lid.

I note the 802.11g signal(s) were not impacted by the closure of the M11xR1 lid.
That's just an observation or maybe the signal strength of those SSID were to low to be impacted.

 

I wonder if the wireless card settings have anything to do with it. Check in adapter properties either in device manager or by going through network and sharing center>change adapter settings.

 

I like the way you think.

I've already gone though every setting and 'tinkered' with it. Like way back when.

Had to disable Bluetooth collaboration as it didn't work for me, but that's nothing to do with what we're looking at here today.

Have my WiFi set for performance versus compatibility.

The power setting is on high and the WiFi has been set as such and etc etc etc...

I'm not really worried. I was just interested to see if my signal dropped when the lid was closed or not.

As you can see at -40db signal strength it's neither here nor there if I loose a few db.

My QNAP NAS can stream HD (don't have any Full-HD) movies via WiFi without any problems. And I have a portable 802.11n range extender. As one does.


Note - When I say drop, I mean decrease. I don't lose a signal, it just decreases slightly.

 

I will go from 4 bars of signal to no signal, only happens when the screen is 100% closed. I would consider the cables getting pinched, but the fact that its happened to both of my r1's (original and replacement) plus all the screens I have gone through.

Going to ring up dell this week and see what they say.

 

My wifi completely turns off when I close my lid. I think there're a power option to prevent that thing but haven't found out yet

 

Just gotta say, that's too expensive of a laptop to be having this kind of issue. Alienware needs to get a fix out. It could be a driver bug that needs to be addressed. Are there older/newer drivers you guys could test with? What is the model of your wifi card?

This is a crazy idea, but what if the tiny connectors that click the antennas in place to the wifi card are coming loose? I've never seen it happen but like I said, its a crazy idea. One more thing, does your laptop have a subwoofer? Maybe the wires are routed near a speaker magnet and it's causing enough interference to jam the wifi signal?

 

No subwoofer in these.

I did a test last night, removed the bottom cover and open and closed the lid a few times. My cables didnt move from where they are in the chassis.

I know its not a driver bug or something to do with the wifi card itself as it does it with my intel 6200 card, bigfoot 1102 card, bigfoot 1103 card, and the stock dell card.

It just seams that the chassis is causing too much of a disturbance in the antenna reception when the lid is closed.

I am going to order a extra lcd screen from ebay and see about modding the screen to shield the cables from the chassis.

Another test I will be doing is as soon as my external antenna shows up (7db gain) I will plug in my external wires to test to see if the wifi drops when I close the lid with antenna that are not mounted in the screen.

 

Funny that you say this, my $200 dell mini 9 gets twice the wifi range/reception as my m11x does.... and that thing still has the stock dell card in it.

 

I think that there may be two lid sensor switches because the backlight and the "ALIENWARE" text do not go on and off at the same time. Perhaps only one is magnetic?

On a related note, why does the keyboard backlighting stay on when the lid is closed if they bothered to kill the "ALIENWARE" text (not talking about the Alien head that is lit by the backlight)? The least they could do is make a "lid closed" event in the AlienFX Control Center so we could turn it off automatically that way but instead the seem to only offer near useless trigger events. Not even "charged, charging, on battery" events.

 

Never really noticed that as I never have the alienware words lit up

 

Sorry if i resume this old post. Found any solutions? I've the same problem.

 

Seems to be a design flaw in the system. I have 2 m11xs right now, they both do it. The other 5 m11xs I have had did it too.

 

do you have a samsung ssd. Uninstall samsung magician. that seems to cure the wifi loosing signal when closing the lid. Must be something to do with the os optamisation