Intel 5300 Mini PCIe WiFi card problems

Dear friends,

Thought I'd throw this out there and see if anyone can shed any light.
I have an Acer Travelmate 6592G which ships with an Intel 4965AGN wifi card). I decided to upgrade the card to Intel 5300 (full length mini PCIe wifi card). It arrived from Ebay yesterday and ever since, it's been hanging my laptop. It only hangs during file copying over wireless.

I have a Netgear DGN3500 with a disk connected via usb. When I try file copying of large files from the share to laptop, the card sometimes freezes the laptop completely (the only way to recover is power down).

Tried the following . . . .

Tried changing channels.
Changed bands, tried 20Mhz, 40 and auto.
Tried another router (WRT610n which I was sure would solve the issue due to it being a serious router).
Tried limiting the kit to 2.5Ghz and 5.2Ghz.
Tried disabling security (WPA2), although inconclusive, I noticed that while I ran tests with no security, the hang did not occur but cant be sure here.
Tried a clean re-install of windows 7.
Tried updating card drivers (tried both bloated intel proset and cut-down latest drivers, also win7 standard drivers).
Tried messing around with power settings and disabling power saving.

I live in a rural location and have no wireless interference whatsoever. I have tried the card at 300Mbps and at 130mbps. The problem seems to occur when I set it up for 300Mbps (max I ca get with just 2 antenna's). Also please note that I am sitting about 8 feet from router so signals are plenty strong.

For the two days that I have been trying to get the card to work properly, it has been hanging my windows 7 and I cannot determine why. When I revert back to my old 4965AGN, the problem disappears so it's definitely the 5300 card.


Is this a bad card?
Can anyone shed any light on this?

Many thanks for any help

 

By "hang" you mean it freezes or BSOD's? Is there any way you could take a peek at the performance logs?

 

No it's not BSOD, It Freezes Windows 7. Nothing responds, not even mouse. Have to power down.

What performance logs? where?

 

1.It may be one of these legendary Ebay chinese wifi cards that have nothing to do with a real Intel.(I have been burnt in the past).

2.This card may be incompatible with your chipset.I have no idea about the specs of your notebook I just mentioning that as a possibility.

 

hmmm ... I did buy it from a chinese seller on ebay...
When I run Intel's automatic driver upgrade from their website, it recognises the card and intels drivers install and run the card happily. Would this be the case if the card was dodgy?

 

Yes, it could be one of those remarked ES cards, which could be a piece of junk. They are very good at remarking, you won't be able to tell, and the person who sells them might not even know either. The hardware is identical anyways though likely an older and buggier version.

They will install on windows since it only checks the hardware id, but if it doesn't work on a linux live image and kicks an obscure firmware error, thats one good way to confirm if its ES. (though it has to be a fairly recent image with the proper kernel drivers)

Before reliable distributors started carrying these cards, I understand why people tried fleabay, but these days its not worth the risk. Some of the sellers I bought ES garbage from still have "good" 99.x% ratings, since they move so much stuff.

 

I'm having the exact same problem with this router and wifi card combo after having upgraded from an intel 3945ABG on an ACER Aspire 5920G and I am running linux. In addition to random freezes when attempting to transfer files from my laptop to my desktop trough sftp, when the transfer fails the desktop can't access the network and I have to reboot the router to fix this.

This happens only when N is enabled in the router though and have no problems when only G is active. This defeats the purpose of having a N router and card though, even more since the original card has better throughput when used with N active on the router even though it's a ABG only card(guess it takes advantage of MIMO when N is active?).

I have a syslog full of error messages and can post it if someone can help with this.