My Wireless connection goes off a few minutes after every reboot

Hi there,

I have a Sony Vaio vgn-z530N with a Windows Vista Business 32bit, which has a built-in wireless device--Intel 5100 VGN. I have had it for 2 years and it had been working well.

Recently I found its wireless connection stops working after a few minutes of each reboot/wake. The "Connect to a network" window shows no wireless networks available. I know there are always several wireless networks available from both my own router and the neighbors. And the physical switch of wireless connector on the front side of the machine remains on when the connection goes out. The physical switch's light is typically off when the problem occurs, but a couple of times it was actually on. I ran the "SmartWi" manual diagnostics tool. It told me "Radio is Off".

So I searched all over the internet to find suggestions such as uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers. The drivers on Sony website wouldn't install correctly (it tells me it has to run on a Windows Vista system only, but that's precisely what I have). I found the latest drivers on Intel website and installed it. But the problem didn't go away.

The only thing that changed is when I run the SmartWi diagnostics tool, now it says "Radio is On" but the next item, "Scan Test", tells me "There are no networks available to connect".

(Just to cover the whole story, I did try turning on and off and on and off the physical switch, and I did take a trip with this laptop recently and the wireless connection in the hotel room did go off but I couldn't tell if it was the bad hotel network or my computer so I didn't pay attention to it at the time.)

I can't imagine the physical wireless card/connector is fried, since it does work for the first few minutes when I start the computer or wake it up. I suspected that maybe the infamous overheating problem that many Vaio laptops suffer from caused the device to stop working when it's too hot... But I can't find any confirmation on that thought from the internet.

Now I have the laptop plug in to an ethernet cable and it works fine. It is very frustrating, though, to have a laptop that can't move around with me...

Please help! Thanks a lot!

 

I have had a similar problem on my S (not so intensive though). I haven't had it since I updated the Intel drivers.

I fear it is still a different situation though, as my wireless is Intel 6200, I have Windows 7 (64bit) and the problem only occurred once every couple of weeks...

What is the driver version you have currently installed? Have you tried to see if the problem persists after reinstalling windows?

 

thank you Gracy123!
The driver I installed is Intel® PROSet/Wireless Software and Drivers for Windows Vista 32-Bit* 13.4.0.0
I haven't reinstalled Windows...I'm still hoping I wouldn't have to...But it seems like that might be inevitable?