Weak Wifi on Envy 15?

Hello everyone,

I recently got my HP Envy 15 in the mail a few days ago and I have to say I’m very happy with it. However, I have run into some setbacks.

The most major one is the wireless. Out of the box it was only getting 180 mbps of wireless N speed, which I knew was way to slow. After digging around the device manager I found that the 2.4 ghz frequency was set to 20 mhz and not auto. After setting it to auto I got 300 mbps, much better.

But heres the big issue. While it does get 300 mbps of speed while only a few yards away from the router, once I leave my room and walk away about 40 or less feet to the dinning room, the speed takes a HUGE nose dive, getting to around 20 to 12 mpbs of wireless internet speed. However, the signal quality is ‘good or fair’, meaning 3 out of 5 green bars. When I go to the living room, about 60 feet from the router, it goes down to 1.0 mbps wireless speed, with 2 out of five bars signal quality. Sometimes however, I can’t get any speed and it disconnects.

I’ve tried many things to fix this. I set my router to transmit only wireless N, I made sure both the router and laptop have their broadcasting power set to max, all frequencies set to auto and recommended security settings for best wireless performance (Reading off the routers setup window here) and nothing has seemed to work to improve the speed range.

So heres what I’m working with:

D-Link DIR-655 Router: Updated to the latest firmware.
HP Envy 15: With Intel centrino advanced-n 6200, with latest drivers.
Internet speed: 30 mbps Comcast cable.
No, my walls are not made out of lead (haha).

I know the router isn’t the most high tech as it once was, but I thought it would have a better wireless N-range than 60 feet or less. Also, we have some other roommates that have notebooks as well and they claim their speed is just fine, and their rooms range from 20, 60, to even 70 feet away from the router (We have a large house). The guy with the room upstairs 70 feet away had an older model Dell XPS notebook gaming rig. I don’t know what his signal quality and speed was, and he moved out awhile ago, but we didn’t hear him complain about slow internet and weak signal.

With those facts laid out, I’m wondering if theres something wrong with the router, or the laptop itself. Is there anything thing I can do to get better wireless range and speed? Do you own an Envy 15 and what is your wireless range/performance?

 

no problems here but i'm just using b/g for web browsing around the house, within 50 foot of transmitter. my cable access is only 15-20mbit and g speed is good enough to support the full bandwidth.

 

You need to be using 5ghz for those big N speeds. I tested actual throughput @ 140mbit (19-20 Megabytes per second) @ 15 feet from my router.

this is in an apartment complex where I can literally see like 25 wireless networks available. allot of interference. I use 5ghz.

 

I am not sure if i will get any responses here but I will ask anyway.

I have a peculiar problem with my LAN. I am in university housing where I am not allowed to use a router. So I have to use an ethernet cable. The problem I am having is whenever instead of the ethernet cable I use my iphone tethered for internet (while wife uses the cable for her net) and then when I stop that and try use the ethernet cable it says no network access. At that point when I restart the laptop it gets internet fine. It also happens sometimes if I remove the ethernet cable and not use any internet but then try and connect to LAN but it won't until I restart.

What could be the issue and any solutions if possible?

Thanks a lot.

 

So I did some more research on my problem and the router. Apparently this router does do this frequently to people. Some others have said the exact same thing, that when they get around 40 feet away from the router the signal quality and speed just tanks, which is a shame. I really don’t want to spend more money just to replace a router that’s already working, well semi-working in this situation anyways.

The whole point of having a laptop is to be mobile. I don’t consider staying in my room very mobile

I have been looking at other routers, this one in particular: NETGEAR - RangeMax Wireless-N Gigabit Router with 4-Port Ethernet Switch - WNR3500-100NAS

It has 8 internal antennas, rather than just 3 like the DIR-655. I’d still like to hear more about what other Envy owners are getting wireless performance wise.

 

I have not specifically checked for speed, but it definitely does seem to be a lot weaker. My Dell 1340 has the stock Dell 1510 N card (Broadcom). It can see at least 15 other wireless networks around my neighborhood. On the Envy, it sees 4-5, and that's including my own two networks (Dlink DIR-825 dual-band router). This is on two different Envys.

 

I'm not a network guru but it sounds like IP address and network setting conflicts. For some reason, its not configuring automatically when you switch between connections. Perhaps your housing uses a static ip address whilst your iphone connection is dynamic (or theyre both static). A way to force this manually is to open up the dos window and use ipconfig/release followed by ipconfig/renew. Hope this helps.

 

I really thought this would work, but unfortunately this is the error I am getting. "An error occurred while renewing interface Local Area Connection : unable to contact your DHCP server. Request has timed out."


maybe I am doing something wrong. It is very irritating though this thing.

Thank you very much for the help though.

 

Yeah my wifi has problems as well, I'm sitting about 3 feet away from my apple wireless N router (tried an older D-link N router as well) and both seem to after a while completely disconnect, I have to disable and re-enable the wireless connection to get it to work again, and sometimes it's still cuts out a lot...

 

I have the exact same problem with my Airport Express wireless N router. Sometimes, my Envy just decides to disconnect and stay disconnected. In some cases i have to restart the computer to get the wireless networking to function again and when it disconnects, it's not able to find any other wireless network even though there are lots of them in my area. This only happens when i'm on the Airport Express network.

Unfortunately no change of settings has been able to fix this problem. I read on another forum that other people with the 6200 adapter in another computer has this problem as well.

 

HI Guys i have same with my envy 15

HP Envy 15 | i7-720QM | 16gb DDR3 | 320gb 7.2k HD | ATI 5830

any one solve this what best solution

 

I've found the best solution is to set up separate SSID names for the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. I only logged in with my laptop to the 5GHz band, so there is no possible way for it to switch to the 2.4GHz, which is mainly for the benefit of other devices like printer and iPhone, etc., that don't have wireless-N capacity.