Series 7 All Models: Understanding the WiFi issue

Samsung Series 7 Chronos NP700Z5A NP700Z3A NP700Z4A NP700Z5B

Discussed here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/625973-samsung-series-7-chronos-intel-wifi-card.html

Issue: Broadcom 943225HMB Wifi card dropping signal, and has limited range when compared to other laptops.



I have just found that Samsung's latest wifi driver includes the Broadcom Wireless Utility. It will report the RSSI signal and noise under the 'link status' tab.

In order for those affected to have a case to back up their claims, please try to:

Have no other users using the router while doing the following.

1. Standardise the distance at about 5 metres away from the router.
2. State the model of your laptop and router.
3. Screenshot the link status tab.
4. Do 3 speedtests at speedtest.net using the same server.
5. Post the screenshot and above-mentioned information.

 

New: A poll has been added for you to indicate your interest.

How to vote:

You may select one or both options.

You MUST select option 1 if you wish to vote.

Select option 1 if you want Samsung to fix.

Select option 2 if you feel you may wish to return the laptop if no solution is implemented.

Select both if you want Samsung to fix AND feel that you may consider returning the laptop if no solution is implemented.

 

This is mine:

Aztech HW550-3G 5m away



Speedtest with 100Mbps Fibre Internet connection

 

The range is marginally worse, but the speed is about the same for me. Saying that, my speed is pretty abysmal anyway. Not going to vote on this cause I think we should focus on getting Samsung to fix the other issues first.

 

That speed is abysmal? In any case my cable internet gives me about 20mbps downloads, and my laptop gives me that no problem.

 

The reason why I'm opening all these polls is to get an idea if the issue really exists. Let's say when I present these threads to my local support, they may just simply wave me off and say mine is an isolated case. No way man, seriously.

With all respect Samsung Singapore has been quite responsive and I hope to present them all three issues at one go, instead of them having to look at and solve them one-by-one, which is a hassle IMHO.

 

I don't have these issues, perhaps your wireless gateway is bad?

And if you want to continue to make polls, you should atleast make them true and hones and let people vote that they don't have any issues with something instead of just trying to drag out those that do.

 

This thread was created to collect information from the owners who insists there is an issue with the Wifi. Personally, my S7 has good wifi.

The poll is an indication of interest. Only those interested will have those issues.

Refer to this page.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/625973-samsung-series-7-chronos-intel-wifi-card-14.html

 

@luterin mine has wireless problems, but mostly in my house... also the thing about range is very obvious... so it is not a 1-2 people problem... lots of users have complained about it already...

 

Even if a few do have this problem, most users don't it seems.

 

Luterin, I cannot help but to address certain perception of yours.

Luterin, on many occasions you seem to insist there's no problem if you don't have it. Just because you don't encounter the problem doesn't mean the others won't have it (like in the case of this wifi problem which you questioned me. I don't have it, but others did say they have.). You should not generalise by saying look even a few do have this problem, others don't have it seems.

If you don't have most of the issues mentioned, good for you, you are just plain lucky or you seldom buy.

Pardon me, but may I just say that you are plain selfish when you try to deprive others from expressing their opinions on the issues. We have genuine issues with the laptop, which is why we bother to come and discuss about it. I have been unlucky for almost 2 years now. No computer I buy has such issues before that ENVY14, and we have been buying since 1995.

 

Instead of posting the same thing twice, like you just did, I'll just link to my other reply.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sam...implement-fixed-mode-bios-18.html#post8237816

 

I'll just link to my other reply too.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sam...implement-fixed-mode-bios-18.html#post8237860

 

I have noticed also a big difference in the wifi signal. Having both my old laptop and the samsung on my desk (about 6m from router), i have 5/5 on my old laptop and 2/5 on Samsung !!!

I dont know if this can be fixed with different drivers, I think it depends on the hardware.. If this is the case, we are doomed...

 

May not help you unless you are within your return window but it looks like some of the new Series 7 laptops are being shipped with Intel wireless. I think this is new news (at least to me). I picked this up from post 3415 in the thread below:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sam...6-models-np700z4-np700z5-342.html#post8245841

 

I have the NP700Z5A-S04US and have swapped out the Broadcom for the Intel 6230. While the Intel 6230 provides somewhat improved performance in the 5 GHz band, it is still pretty poor compared to other laptops that I have tested in the same spot in front of the wireless router - both in terms of speed and strength of signal. I called Intel tech support again today after trying drivers from the Intel site and the Samsung site. After 30 minutes of trying to reset all kinds of wireless properties the tech rep came to the conclusion that Samsung's integration of the Intel card was not ideal. He admits that the card works really well with some laptops and not well at all with others.

It may have something to do with the antenna implementation as well.

 

I also replaced the broadcom wifi adapter with an intel 6230. With this adapter I get a better signal but the signal seems to drop sometimes although my connection have 4 of 5 bars strenght. But the strengt of the signals seems to change al the time between 3,4 and 5 from 5. Can I do something to make it stable?

With speedtest I got 28 mb/s and 5 minutes later at exactly the same spot I got 5 mb/s :s

 

Check for other WiFi signals fighting over the same (or adjacent) channel. Perhaps run InSSIDer to find out what else is around and then move your router to a quieter channel.

John

 

I was wanting to confirm my suspicions as to the poor wi-fi reception I thought I was getting so I carried out the test. I compared my NP700Z with my wife's macbook and 5m from the router the NP700Z was slightly ahead and giving good results, 10Mbps on 10Meg Virgin connection. However when I moved into the room next door (one brick wall between the two rooms) my speed dropped to 2.3Mbps while the macbook remained around 8Mbps. On 2 occasions the wi-fi signal was lost altogether!

This is incredibly poor and unacceptable performance for a such a fundamental piece of hardware. I think my 12 year old toshiba would have given better results before it finally packed up!

 

Can I use a external Wifi adapter?

 

My 5 year old Dell definitely gives better results than my S7 15. I ended up buying a new router and repositioning it to get acceptable performance from the S7. My S7 slate has no problem.

 

I experimented the last few days with my router and my S7. The problem stays the same. But with the connection is nothing wrong, with speedtest I get a 7 ms response and 28 mb/s. Then after a few minutes or hours my signals drops to 0.5 mb/s with a response of 8 ms. When I restart my wifi adapter the signals raised a little to 4 mb/s. My 4 years old hp has a stable 28 mb/s all the time.

 

That looks like a software issue. Are you running the latest driver? Try whatever Samsung is offering and the latest from the WiFi card manufacturer.

John

 

If you truly want to have an idea on whether people encounter the problem or not, you should simply reformulate the poll like so:

-do you have noticeable wifi problem(s)?
>yes
>no

And that's it. Your polls are often too subjective and editorialized.
Just saying, nothing personal or offensive.

 

Was thinking the same before. I don't own a Chronos but having polls with no option is a bit weird...

 

This thread was created because owners with wifi problems were complaining in the wifi thread that they had the issue. It is for them to show the problem, but seemingly only one or two did. I cannot change the poll on NBR.

Due to the fact that there are always mischievous people who will try to disrupt the progress, your method of asking may not always work. Samsung could always point to the others who voted they did not encounter the issue and determine not an issue.

Hence, when I first crafted the 'petition' type of poll, it is meant as an indication of interest for the fix, instead of a conventional vote. That is why only if one is interested, then should he/she put down his/her name. In short, this serves to work as a petition, and has worked well for the 'Fixed BIOS' petition in the sticky.

 

I bought a NP700Z3A-S03SE (Chronos 7 14") and returned it at once because of the bad WiFi signal. I took out a new one and this one have the same issue. My old laptop always has perfect signal but this one shows "bad". Also i tried putting 2 laptops right next to this one and they got 20 Mb down speed in speedtest while i only got 1 mb. And this time we put the laptops right next to the router so they all had perfect signal.

Anyone know what thee problem can be? Any solutions avaiable? Do I need to change the network card? i got Broadcom atm

 

I am about to buy a Samsung Series 7 NP700Z5AH, 15.6" but I am starting to get cold feet re the wifi and touchpad problems many people seem to experience.
Is it indeed a real problem with all of the machines?
I am depended on Wifi because I travel a lot and work with the internet.

If I go and buy it what should I do to find out if the one I just bought has a problem?

 

1. Make sure it has the Intel wifi card, and not the Broadcomm.
2. Update to the latest drivers and test it thoroughly.

I had some initial problems until I updated the drivers. It has been fine since then.

The touchpad issues are overblown. I find it perfectly acceptable after tweaking the settings.

 

Does the broadcomm card not work properly even after the new drivers are installed??

 

It depends on your setup. It works fine for me, but if you have a cheap gateway with poor range you might experience worse performance. For me its better than my old Asus UL30VT.

Oh, and I haven't updated any drivers for the wifi.

 

Cheers, just making sure. Might finally decide to commit to buy now!!

 

Not for me. Made no difference.
My Samsung 9 has made two trips to the Texas warranty repair center. Returned both times with no improvement. They state "they could not replicate the problem".

Solution: An Asus External USB-N10 IEEE WI-FI Adapter.
Disable the Broadcom one in Device manager.
Install the Asus.
This one is small, external, robust and works extremely well.
All WiFi issues are gone.

Any other one will work; this one is the most compact, least obtrusive.

No help at all from Samsung, but I like everything else on the machine. Now, it's just about perfect.

 

I just took a look at the Asus USB WI-FI adapter mentioned above. Very nice! So small, unobtrusive, and much better looking than the others I've seen. Great price too.

I recently got a Belkin N-150 wireless router for dirt cheap, and it's worked surprisingly well with my Samsung Series 7 (It's supposedly one of the worst routers you can buy according to many reviews, and after reading this thread, my expectations for decent a wireless experience were quite low). The thing is, it's the only wireless connection the laptop detects in my home. With my 6 year old Dell laptop, I can detect numerous additional connections from across the street, the neighbors, etc... So I can see that the Series 7 does have some range issues.

So... I may just buy the Asus USB adapter as a backup for when I'm out and/or traveling. Thanks for the heads up!

 

So the Series 7, with the antenna being clad in the aluminium lid, actually suffers quite a bit in range and signal even with Intel wifi card...

 

Hi, so I have the broadcom card, and actually have had no issues with signal or whatever. Performs pretty good. Just 2 things-
1. link speed is shown as 130Mbps, I have dual band N600 netgear router (capable of 300mbps on both bands simultaneously, i think?) ,at 40Mhz channel thus my laptop should get a link of 300mbps, no?
2.major issue: Wifi connects fine and really fast after reboot, but after 4-5secs, it gets disconnected,i mean it turns off. I have to go to the quick settings and turn in on. Happens only after reboot.

Isolated issues?

 

I don't think the broadcom supports channel bonding so 150 is the max you can get out of it (20Mhz operation vs 40Mhz). That's an advantage of the Intel part.

 

ah... can sum1 confirm this? So if i get the intel card, do i get the "6230 IEEE 802.11n (draft) Bluetooth 3.0 - Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Combo Adapter" or "Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6230 Wifi Half Mini Wireless Plug-In Card Data Transfer Rate 300 MBps"
?? both are on amazon/ebay... but i cant differentiate between them.

EDIT:NVM, both seem to be the same.

 

Just make sure the card is NOT HP/Dell/Lenovo branded.

 

I just wanted to chime in here. I bought this laptop yesterday from Best Buy (so I have their model, but it's the newer/updated version with the backlit keys, Intel wifi, etc.). I was pretty excited and after unpacking it found myself grated by the sharp palm rest edge (which I didn't notice in the store) and the fact that the screen looked a lot less sharp/more diluted in terms of colour than it had appeared in the store as well (I probably just wasn't paying close enough attention though).

These are things I can live with considering I am otherwise happy with the product. However, the Wifi on my laptop is so abysmal that I literally can't even surf the web.

My previous laptop was a 2009 Toshiba Satellite. I'm a student sharing a router with two other people in my house and with my Satellite I typically received literal speeds of roughly 600kbps - 1.5MBps (depending on time of day, whether all of us were online at the same time, etc.).

I plugged in my Chronos 7 and set up the Wifi, updated all the drivers and the BIOS and the Windows Updates...and I'm sitting here downloading a file at 25kbps (give or take). It's been like this all day no matter what I download.

I wondered if maybe it was the files I was downloading (which I doubted since they were through Microsoft). I took the laptop into my housemate's room (the router is in his bedroom). Usually bringing my Toshiba into his room would give me close to 2MBps or greater. I was lucky to get 100kpbs with the Chronos.

To further test the connection and ensure it was the Wifi device giving me issues, I disabled the Wifi connection and manually hooked up to the router via ethernet. My download speeds immediately jumped to roughly 2MBps. When I unplugged the ethernet and re-activated the Wifi, down it went again to usually 50kpbs tops. The average seems to be half of that.

At first I thought my device was defective, but then I found all these topics across numerous websites on Google. The fact that these problems have been reported as far back as November and Samsung has apparently done NOTHING to resolve them (let alone even acknowledge that there's a problem to begin with) is astounding to me. I mean, if it were a bargain laptop I would say you get what you pay for, but with a $1,000 price tag - and with such otherwise nice specs - I am simply bewildered that their Wifi is slower than anything I've ever used. I'm returning the laptop tomorrow because frankly I can't sit around and hope that they "fix" the problem in the near future, especially considering some people are saying the issue lies within the construction of the device itself and the placement of the antenna.

I hope I'm not coming across as a whiny jerk or anything - I've just been extremely frustrated by this last night, and my worst case scenario then was that I got a defective device...but to see the fact that this is a widespread issue, and that Samsung refuses to acknowledge it let alone help their consumers out? I find that to be quite appalling and I do plan on contacting their customer service department unless I'm in the wrong with this and my situation is out of the ordinary (in which case I would love for one of you to correct anything I've said!).

Cheers.

 

The most common reason for having bad Wifi is running on battery without having changed the Power Option settings on Wifi. If you haven't they will be on extreme power saving for Wifi giving you poor performance.

Other than that, you either seem to have a bad router or a bad notebook, because your wifi problems are not normal. Limiting to under 100kbps is not standard for this laptop in any way.

This is a Speedtest I just ran this very minute on my Chronus S7 using just Wifi:


And I have the Broadcom chip which people claim they have most problems with.

 

Ok I want to clarify certain things.

Luterin, you are correct. In order to get the most out of the wifi, one must set the Wifi performance to Best performance.

However, I have several laptops now after refunding the S7 and found that the wifi performance of the S7 is indeed disappoint even with the options set correctly. It seems that the antennas being placed in the full aluminium lid caused severe performance degradation in some use cases. Try streaming Youtube 1080p videos over S7 Wifi and you will likely notice constant pauses as the video needs to buffer due to the low bandwidth between the router and the antenna+wifi chip. My other laptops don't exhibit this problem and I am on Fibre 100Mbps plan.

 

This is the thing, I have no issues what so ever, even at 10M range with a few walls between my router and S7. And under no circumstances should you get as little as 100kbps as portishead stated unless you are very far from your router, the router is of very poor quality or something is wrong.

I can stream 1080p videos just fine when on my balcony which is on the other side of the house compared to my router.

Do the S7 have limitations due to the construction is has? Yes, it has, but they are not as bad as some people are experiencing. They must have other issues aswell.

 

Luterin's experience and expertise not withstanding, yes the S7 antenna performance is much lower than any other laptop I've come across. Yes, it is as bad as some people are experiencing.

 

How do you know that the issues others have experienced aren't simply a result of the power settings not being adjusted correctly?

 

I don't know that the issues others have experienced aren't due to that simple explanation. I can't speak for them. I speak of my own experience.

I know for a fact that the poor performance that I have personally experienced with my S7 occur with the wireless adapter set to maximum performance.

 

My power settings are all on maximum performance and the laptop has been plugged-in. I'm currently downloading a file through a website that I would typically see speeds up to 2MBps on, and I'm getting 140kbps tops. No one else is online at the moment and I'm relatively close to the router.

As noted in my previous post: with all other WiFi devices (including my previous laptop) I would typically receive as much as 1.5MBps in the exact same room I'm in now. I have had no other problems with WiFi devices, nor have any of my roommates. The router my housemate bought was very expensive (he purposely got a high-end model knowing that multiple people would be connected in the house) and we have had no issues with it. All signs point directly to the laptop itself, not anything else.

 

With such a slow internet connection as 2Mbit, you should be able to get close to same speeds no matter if you are using an Ethernet cable or using Wifi. But since you are only getting small part of this you are having issues, and there are tons of different possibilities on what it could be.

What is your speed when you connect to another computer on your local network? If it's also as low as 140kbps then you are having some general Wifi issues, which includes bad hardware in your S7 that needs to be replaced.

But if you get good speed from other computers on your LAN it's most likely settings in your gateway or simillar that might be acting up. It might be QoS related, or Frame size related (usually doesn't matter on low speeds thou), or something else, but it is most likely not hardware related.

Where I am located right now I get around 75Mbit from Internet and 100Mbit from my local fileserver.


So my Wifi sure doesn't have a bottleneck at 150kbps.

EDIT:
BTW, do you have any idea what channel your wifi is on and what the "air" around you is like? Depending on where you live, in proximity to how many other gateways, channels matter A LOT for the overall wifi performance.

 

This is very important as the Series 7 wifi antenna already has worse signal reception due to the lid.

 

2MBps speeds are actually considered very fast in my area. I'm on a college campus and a lot of people I know get less than 500kbps. I'm assuming you're overseas where the Internet connections tend to be much better? Sadly, in the US it's rather poor. Comcast is the only service provider in the area and I've never heard of anyone getting above 3MBps.

i'm not sure what channel it's on or anything. like i said, all i know is with every other wi-fi device i've used i usually got around 1.5MBps when in my own room (down the hall from the bedroom that has the router) and the other computers connected to the router are having none of the same problems i've experienced since purchasing this computer. but i'm not sure that it's bad hardware, because, as i pointed out, there are similar accounts of wifi issues with the Series 7 all over the web. you might have gotten lucky with yours but my issue seems to be fairly common.