Possible Problems with 6205 Wireless on a new W530 ...

I just received my new W530 (i7-3740QM, 16G, K2000M, 1TB 7200rpm HDD, BD-RW, 6205 wifi) and I'm seeing some strange problems with wireless connections. The machine has the 6205 wireless card & Win 7 PRO. I've installed all the new Lenovo & windows updates (at least I think I have).

The first couple days I used the machine only on my home wireless network and I did not see any problems (both with battery and AC power). My connection on my home network is very good and quite a bit faster than I've seen on my other machines. So I thought all would be good. However, yesterday, I took the machine to a local library and attempted to connect and was unable to get a stable connection (I actually never got any connection). It appears to be attempting to connect, connecting for short periods, and then re-attempting to connect continuously. I visit this hotspot often and have never had any connection problems with my other machines. I also connected flawlessly with one of my other older laptops with the W530 sitting next to it without a connection. I was plugged in and not running on battery power. Any ideas?

I did see a few posts on the Lenovo forums about stability issues with the 6205 related to allowing the driver to de-power the wifi card to conserve battery power. Would this setting affect operation of the 6205 when running on AC power? Certainly seems like it shouldn't. The other issue is that I don't see any connection issues while running on my home network whether running on battery or AC. Something seems ODD.

Really want to determine what this issue is so I can get stable wifi connections. Anyone have any suggestions?

 

have you tried playing with the power settings of the card? In the card configuration, for example, you can uncheck the box that says "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" in the Power Management tab, and in the Advanced tab I played around with some settings like transmit power and roaming until I got some stability in my T420's 6205 card

 

Yes, I did play with the "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" setting in the driver dialog. I didn't screw with transmit power & roaming settings however. Part of my question was whether the "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" should affect how the machine runs when NOT on battery. Since I've seen these odd connection issues running on both BATTERIES & AC. I'd guess that setting shouldn't come into play when on AC which, if true, is pointing to a deeper (possibly HW) issue. I'm really trying to determine if there are other problems with the 6205 card than just specific driver settings. Can anyone provide some direction on which driver settings should/should not be adjusted for stable 6205 operation?

On a side note, I did test the computer again yesterday at the same hotspot with the "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" disabled and I had the SAME INSTABILITY ISSUES and was NOT able to connect. However, I did try another hotspot and was able to connect, so either the instability issues are hit or miss or there's something about the first hotspot that is causing a problem. But again, I can connect with 2 other machines at the first hotspot without any issues. I'm not comfortable with random instability. I really didn't plan on having to chase connection issues with the new W530 - I certainly was hoping it would have been more stable out-of-the-box.

Can anyone help me to determine if I have a hardware problem?

 

Here are Intel's settings for optimum wireless performance:

Wireless Networking — What are the recommended settings for 802.11n connectivity?

Also make sure to enable the following on the router: 40 MHz channel width, WPA2 personal / AES encryption and Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM).

Wi-Fi drops and can't connect problems are usually driver issues and OS compatibility while not getting "300Mbps or stuck at 54Mbps only" are router / adapter software settings problem.

Unfortunately, Intel WiFi adapters are picky when it comes to router / access point since on my laptop which had the Centrino 1000N was able to connect to my Netgear router without a problem while it can't connect to Airport Express router at my friend's house.