W520 connects at 5 GHz only at 54 mbps. Any idea?

Hello,

Recently got a new w520. After reading this site for weeks I finally caved with a fair discount.

However got a little issue with my wifi, been trying to solve this for a while. I have the w520 with Intel Ultimate 6300. I did a clean install and everything, all latest drivers, but my wifi only connects to my router at 54 mbps at 5 GHz. It's not my router as my HTPC can connect fine at ~300 mbps at 5 GHz. Any idea?

Thanks.

 

It should connect at a higher rate than 54mbps even on 20Mhz, but make sure it's set to 40Mhz and see if that changes anything.

 

I went to adapter properties under manage wireless networks, and under 802.11n channel width for band 5.2, it is set to auto. My only other option is 20 MHz.

It it still 54 mbps =/

 

found the problem.. wow cant believe this, you need to enable your bluetooth radio in order to go beyond 54 mbps..

just turned on my bluetooth radio and signal jumped to 240 mbps, good enough

 

That's odd. It certainly isn't the case for my T420 and the Intel 6205.

I guess anything with the W520 shouldn't surprise me at this point.

 

Hello,

Sorry to hijack the thread but i thought i would as i have a similar problem and the OP fixed there own.

I have a W520 with a Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205.

Since i brought it i was running at 2.4GHz (130Mbps) with no problems

Then recently there was a Lenovo update, which i updated to so i was on the latest version.

Now it won't connect higher than 54Mbps.

Any ideas why?

I have checked my settings and they are the same as what they were before the update.

Any help would be appreciated

 

What happens if you remove the update?

 

If i remove the update, Won't that remove the driver altogether? then the wifi card won't work?

 

If you have the original installation package that works, that's low risk, right?

Or are you using Lenovoodoo Thinkdisadvantage System Update?

I do all of my installations and updates manually.

 

Oh right i see, but judging by the update history there was a previous version of the wifi driver for intel cards installed which is most likely the version my wifi N worked properly on.

Which driver version do you have for your 6205?

ha yeah i use the lenovo update. This is my 1st Thinkpad so i thought using that would be best.

I don't get why the latest version doesn't work properly for me

 

How do you tell what speed you are getting?

 

I right click the signal bar in the notification area of the taskbar.. Then i click on 'open network and sharing center'.. then i click on my network connection where it says 'connections' then it will bring up the 'Wireless Network connection status' which tells me my speed.

I'am happy to say i'm now back at 130Mbps

Thanks Thors.Hammer for getting me thinking when you said you update manually. (I didn't think of this before, I thought my W520 was up to date)

I went to the Intel site and done a automatic detect to check my 6205 was up to date and surprise surprise it wasn't. I updated to 14.3.1 from 14.3.0 now i'm getting 130Mbps again.

My Intel Graphics drivers were also not up to date

I thought the Lenovo updater kept the system up to date.. Not impressed

 

Since you know how to find updates, I would stay clear of letting things happen automatically. I would remove ThinkVantage System Update (TVSU) and just get in the habit of checking the various sites for updates.

Work from the "It isn't broke so I'm not fixing it" model.

Getting security updates from Windows Update is one thing, but letting a BIOS update brick your machine via TVSU is something else.

As a habit, I usually use support.lenovo.com for my ThinkPad drivers. I rarely need to go to Intel or NVIDIA for something.

 

The updates didn't happen automatically, TVSU doesn't have the ability to do that based on what I've seen and the research i done it said Lenovo stopped auto updates, however i did get a update for TVSU earlier which added a update schedule option which runs a monthly check and lets you know when there is a update but doesn't automatically download and install.

The problem was TVSU didn't show the latest update from intel for the 6205 wireless card when i used TVSU to check for available updates, Even now when i did the automatic detect at the lenovo support site it still shows the previous version of drivers for the 6205 that didn't work properly for me. The only way to get the latest version was at the Intel site.

also maybe i'm doing something wrong but at the lenovo site it shows you a list of drivers on your system but it doesn't say if the drivers you currently have are old? or maybe it does and it just thinks all my drivers are up to date. (which they wasn't)

But yes i agree "If it's not broke, don't fix it" but at the time my W520 was still very new even thou i'd been using it a couple of weeks already, i just wanted it to be up to date, so that i wouldn't have to worry about prior bugs etc.

After trying to fix the the speed issue with no success i just gave up and and decided i'd wait for updated driver and see if the problem would be fixed which it has been, It would have been fixed much sooner if TVSU had showed driver version 14.3.1 as available which it didn't and the lenovo site still doesn't

My current nvidia driver version is 275.93, at the nvidia site it says the latest version is 296.10 makes me wonder how many versions there are in between. I'm not familiar with nvidia so might not be that many, i'm use to ATi

 

NVIDIA tends to jump a lot of version numbers so it's probably at most like 4 ~ 5 revisions behind.

 

Thanks for letting me know, I thought i might be a good few versions behind.