Poor wifi performance on new Vaio Z

On a cleanly installed Win7 machine (Ultimate x64) with Sony drivers installed, I am getting poor performance for wifi. This is a brand new Vaio Z (VPCZ227GG)

Other laptops I have available to me at home have broadband test performance of ~20Mbps, but this laptop is getting <1 Mbps over 802.11n

I've blown away the wireless device and reinstalled cleanly to no avail.

ANyone else seeing this?

Ian

 

I had a wireless problem. It turned out to be the power settings:
Control panel -> Power Options -> Edit plan settings (for the power setting you are using) -> Change advanced power settings. Then make sure the "Wireless adapter settings" are set to "Maximum performance" for both "on battery" and "plugged in".

It probably isn't that, but it's worth checking.

 

Have you switched on the 5Ghz mode? If other notebooks are using 5Ghz and you are only on 2.4Ghz then it's logical to have reduced performance. You can change this in the VAIO Smart Network utility (little green box with 2 white arrows, right hand corner)

 

Intel® Driver Update Utility

device mannager> wifi > 2th-tab (advanced)> 802.11n channel Width for band 2.4 > change to AUTO

 

ok, thanks for the suggestion - it wasn't that

the current settings are for "medium power saving" on battery & "max performance" when plugged in.

I'm seeing the issue when plugged in ....

 

did that. performance is still terrible.

I also checked I was running the latest driver from Sony support site (intel centrino advanced 6230) and checked using Intel utility (it said go to manufacturer).

 

More testing using Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test to a server 5ms from me.

I see an initial speed burst up to 5-10 Mbps and then the speed backs off dramatically only delivering a sustained transfer rate of 0.5Mbps (my other laptops retested just now and are doing ~19Mbps over 802.11n).

It smells like TCP config issues? MTU, window size, timers????

Over ethernet things are just fine - I get ~19Mbps.

The issue is just with wireless

Ian

 

Solved!!!

After reading this post

Slow wireless download in Windows 7 - Microsoft Answers

I went into my (new) Netgear wireless router and noticed that the default encrytion setting was WPA-PSK [TKIP] + WPA2-PSK [AES]. I changed this to WPA-PSK [TKIP] and the problem has disappeared.

It looks like the Sony driver can't do AES particularly well. Perhaps something to feed back to them?

Ian

 

I also had performance issues.
It worked better when I disabled the 5GHz but I did not want to give that up.

Sony did not have any updates so I searched the Intel site for the 6230, which is what we have in our Z2.

The Intel update tool did not work as it does not recognize the card, but going to this page will get you an updated driver:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Det...64-bit)*&DownloadType= Software Applications

I downloaded the latest driver (the one from September) and after doing so the performance was as I expected it to be with both 2.4 and 5 GHz radios active.

Hope this helps.

Luc