Laptop Wifi Troubles

Lately I’ve been having a bit of trouble with the Atheros AR956x Wifi NIC in my laptop - it drops packets occasionally, usually only for around 10~50ms at a time, but enough to cause real grief with gaming. I confirmed the other day while playing Team Fortress 2 with Duncan that it’s not our internet, it’s my NIC, because his machine (considerably older and slower than mine) wasn’t dropping network frames and mine was. TF2 is aggravating to play like that, because “stops” when walking usually indicate you bumped into a spy, turning me incredibly paranoid.

I dug out our old Acer Aspire, which Sabriena and Ruby managed to pour coffee on years ago and it’s languished in the closet since. I can get it to work as long as the battery isn’t 100% full and it’s not plugged in, but that’s so annoying I wouldn’t wish using it on anyone. It’s really not worth repairing now, though I may look into doing so when I get a decent soldering iron just as an experiment on a piece of hardware that really isn’t worth anything (I should probably have sold it for parts when it was still decently current).

The Wifi adaptor in the Acer (Intel 3945ABG) only supports up to 802.11g, so I’d be giving up ~150mbps and going back to ~50mbps, but that’s probably not really a problem as the few times I go to copy things over the network whatever drive I’m copying to/from usually can’t maintain anywhere near that, and our home broadband isn’t good enough to make that an issue anyway (usually hovering around 12mbps even if I hogged it all to myself).

Anyway, I grabbed the Wifi adapter out of it yesterday, and this morning I took my laptop apart once again to discover that mine only has a half-height MiniPCIe slot, and this is a regular MiniPCIe card.

Back to the drawing board I guess.

Horsham, VIC, Australia

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fwaggle

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Horsham, VIC, Australia

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