Windows 7 and wifi

When i first installed windows7 it worked. A few updates later and it doesnt. I manually selected the driver and got the card recognised again. But now it wont pick up any local networks. Anyone have similar issues with the aao and win7? Its the atheros card

 

Are you using the latest wifi driver, v7.6.1.194?

 

v7.6.1.184 works for me in both XP and Windows 7.

I modified the description string in the netathw.inf file as follows, so that I could be sure that I had selected the correct version of the driver from the numerous variants that Windows offered me.

ATHER.DeviceDesc.3067 = "Atheros AR5007EG Wireless Network Adapter v7.6.1.184"

 

This may help, (THIS IS A REPOST FROM A SIMILAR THREAD OF THE SAME SUBJECT BECAUSE THE LINK DIDN'T WORK)

I installed the Launch Manager version on the Acer website that is actually designed for the D150. When I did it no longer worked with the automatically chosen Wifi Adapter that was installed by windows on first boot of Win7.

I tried all the Atheros drivers and settled on the AR5007EG then updated it using windows update to version 7.6.0.172 and had few problems since. I still fight with transfering from a VISTA machine but that's still an unresolved VISTA problem. I have the same issue pushing and pulling to and from a XP machine from the Vista box. Vista is HORRIBLE at file sharing. Maybe because they removed NetBEU??

 

The latest driver seems to be Atheros v7.6.1.221 - can be downloaded from http://tinyurl.com/4s8lcx

Have just loaded it and it updated the driver - haven't had time to check whether it solves anything (or has new bugs).

 

ihartley, the 1.210 and 1.221 drivers do not work with Win7 at all. I tried. They are only for XP etc. The latest that works on Win7 is the 1.204 driver for Vista.
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/ind ... opic=14833

 

Actually, I'm using the 221 driver. It won't install the update automatically as the dates are earlier than the 204 driver, but you can force it by manually selecting it.

 

Thanks for the tip. I was able to get it too load. And at first it looked promising. The first time that I was able to retrieve the complete test file several times with 11g switched on. Although the speed wasn't really so good, but better than 11b (it was around 750/850 compared to 500 KB/s). However, I got several BSODs (one right after installation, so I now make a habit of rebooting after I apply wifi drivers), a freeze, a completely blanked screen ... Not during the file retrieval tests, but just on other occasions. In short, I was getting more BSODs in that one or two hours I tested than in all the time since I installed Win7. So, I went back to the 204 driver and had only one BSOD since then (after installing the Realtek Audio drivers, right when I wanted to reboot).
I did some testing with my other Laptop where I didn't ever use wifi in my home. That runs XP and has a built-in Ralink chip. I get a steady 1MB/s download rate with 11g. That's bad for 11g and obviously caused by the AP. I just bought a cheap TP-Link AP to insert the AA1 in my LAN. For that it's ok. On the other laptop the connection stays up just fine thru all large downloads.
I then did some more tests with the AA1 and also downloaded with both at the same time. That got me an interesting result. The AA1 wasn't able to download, not even on 11b speed. After a short while it would stop with an error message (timeout or so) and retry, retry and retry without ever recovering. While my laptop with XP and ralink just kept going on happily.
I think one cause of the problems with transferring big files to the AA1 is caused by error recovery, either of the driver or the Windows TCP/wifi stack.
Obviously, when there is not much bandwidth available then you will get more and more drops and errors. The bandwidth for 11g over my AP is low, but the driver or Windows is nevertheless trying to max that out and probably gets in some really troublesome mode this way. When I reduce to 11b it won't try that much as there's at last satisfying bandwidth for 11b available. However, now when I reduce that again by way of downloading with another wifi target it comes into trouble again. The behavior is not completely consistent, e.g. I get timeouts on 11b, but more serious issues like a complete drop of wifi or freeze or BSOD on 11g. Another hint is that I get at least 1 MB/s and often up to 1.5 MB/s with Fedora 10, which indicates that the error recovery and performance of it is much better. Even better than XP.
Conclusion: if there is a good 11g connection, maybe 3-5 MB/s, the problem with big files may not appear or much less often.
Maybe you can do something by changing some buffer values, but I didn't try yet. I noticed that the 221 XP driver had many more editable parameters than the Vista drivers. There's also a 5006X driver listed as compatible and I see that laptopvideo2go has also drivers where some extra options have been allowed to be available. Maybe I'll check during the week if any of that helps. But I fear I rather get some more BSODs ;-)

 

Just a thought, do you have Remote Differential Compression enabled? Disabling this boosted my speeds to 1800kb/s on my wifi, from about 950kb/s. Also, no more bluescreens.

 

Thanks for the tips. I'm pretty sure that RDC doesn't come into play when I use wget. It may be enabled if I drag and drop a file from one PC to another but not if I use a third-party tool. Anyway, I disabled it, rebooted, tested again and immediately got another bluescreen. I'm getting these now consistently in igdkmd32.sys which is the Intel Graphics driver. I applied the latest Intel chipset drivers some days ago, intel_chipset_9.1.0.1012.exe, but the driver shown under Display Adapters is 8.15.10.1620. The second poster at viewtopic.php?f=80&t=11775 is also getting bluescreens with that driver. I don't know if that is the same or a similar driver or if there is any connection to the driver shown in display adapters. After all, the chipset driver is more than just a graphics driver. Which version do you have under display adapters?
I'll try if I can rollback. If I can't that 9.1.0.1012 doesn't have a connection to the display adapter.

Roll back brings me to 8.15.10.1590. Is that the driver you have?

 

I'm just using the driver that installed with Windows 7 at the moment (the pre release WDM ones). The version is 8.15.10.1620, I think they were updated recently via Windows Update. I have the same driver versions as you (as in the Intel Beta Chipset ones) but no bluescreens so far. Give me a test to do, and I'll give it a go.

 

I'm very surprised, but disabling RDC boosted the bandwidth, indeed. Not consistently, but often enough it starts at around 2 MB/s. However, the downside of this is that the problem, be it a stop, wifi drop, freeze or bluescreen, happens just much faster. Usually within a few seconds and no more than 10 or 20 MB into the file. I tried several drivers again. Nothing helps. I think I give up for now, use 11b and wait for Win RC1 in the hope it's going to be better then. There's not that much speed difference, anyway. Compared to a wired connection it's snail slow. So, when I want to transfer hundreds of MB of data using the cable seems to be a better choice, anyway.
Thanks for all your tips!

 

Ihartley you're the man, The latest driver (7.6.1.221) - Fixed EVERYTHING!!!!

So happy. I stopped bidding on a new wifi card on ebay immediately.

 

Using the driver windows 7 installed driver 1.0.07 works fine, no problems so far. actually all drivers that came with windows 7 work fine.

 

Could someone help me out with an easy question (that I can't easily find an answer to)? Sorry, I'm new to Windows.
How do I even install the new driver? I downloaded and decompressed the v7.6.1.221 exe. Next, I opened Device Manager, but I'm stuck here. Which device is my WiFi? Other devices>ethernet controller? Network adapters>Realtek RTblahblah PCI-E Fast Ethernet NIC? Something else? Once I find it, I just click update driver and select something (not sure which file) from the x32 folder? Thanks for helping a windows noob.

 

It didn't help me, but glas it did some. See my latest post on the Wifi section for details