Latitude E6400, Intel Wifi Link 5300 AGN Drops Connections

Hi Bob. I'm having a very similar issue with some E6400's with 5300AGN adapters.

Some users are reporting the adapter drops thier connection every 20 min or so.

Were you able to find a resolution for this issue?

Hi Rivettmj

I've found that some of these issues have been resolved by ramping up the Power Management slider in the 5300 AGN properties window to max has resolved the issue for a few users.

I found some info in an intel release notes document.

Searching for 5300 drivers i got here:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/filter_results.aspx?strTypes=all&ProductID=3062&OSFullName=Windows*+XP+Professional&lang=eng&strOSs=44&submit=Go%21

and then clicking the release notes link for the driver i get this:

http://downloadmirror.intel.com/17228/eng/relnotes_x.htm

here is one of the known issues:

Linksys* Access Point Association Timeout

After the association flow completes, the adapter stays awake (as in CAM mode) for 10 seconds, and then acts according to the PowerIndex (PI) regkey. PI should not be change during this period. The association timeout is 10 seconds. Using the Linksys access point, association occurs every 60 seconds, resulting in deauthentication and disconnection from the Linkysys access point.

The regkey in the statement above is directly controled by the power management slider i mentioned above. I think for some of my users cranking the setting to max has resolved the issue.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you get anywhere with this.

I've got the same issue with a new E4300, I think the problem is with the Intel 5300 Drivers.  After a seeming random amount of time (could be 5 minutes or 45) any new TCP connections over the wireless adapter fail, ICMP (Ping) and UDP work fine, and existing (Open) TCP sessions are ok as well (remote desktop sessions, SSH sessions, etc)

The card also randomly has issues pulling an IP address (shows connected to the access point)

This is on a freshly installed XP SP3 install, with only the dell network drivers (onboard) and the intel wireless drivers (from dells support site)

This issue happens when connected to a Linksys 54g access point, and a friends Netgear router as well.

After a little google-searching it looks like there is an extensive tread on a lenovo support site about Thinkpads with  the same problem

http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=X_Series_Thinkpads&thread.id=3504&view=by_date_ascending&page=5

I've just rebuilt with Vista Enterprise 64bit, we'll see if the drivers are any more stable under Vista :)

Anyone got a quick fix for this issue?

Thanks for the reply!  Sadly this has not resolved the issue (it was already set on the highest setting)

Its an odd problem, since it does not really 'drop' my connection, it just seems unable to open new TCP sessions.

Bob,

I had exactly the same problem as you describe.  I tried a number of things to resolve it without success - wireless adapter power adjustments, roaming adjustments, wireless adapter de-install/re-install, Linksys WRT54G firmware upgrade, TCP/IP reset, etc. 

Finally, I resolved the problem by disabling my WEP encryption.  Apparently, there is some incompatibility between the Intel Wifi Link 5300 AGN adapter and my Linksys WRT54G router relative to WEP encryption.  Currently, encryption is disabled, but I plan to try other encryption modes (e.g. WPA) to secure my wireless network.

Kind regards,

Rex L. Farris

I have experienced the same problem as everyone else. This problem only seems to happen with home wireless networks. I have power saving, Ad Hoc Channel, throughput enhancement. When this did not work I uninstalled and reinstalled teh driver, minus teh Intel utility and let WIndows manage my wireless with the same result. Regardless you change your encryption method as no encryption is still more secure than WEP.

I have the same problem here with a Netgear router.  When the Intel wifi is enabled, it frequently drops the router and any other computers connected lose connectivity as well.  When I disable the wifi, all other connections are fine.  Do any Dell technicians monitor these boards to address these issues?

I finally got my E6400 working on my home wireless. I have a Linksys WRT300N router and I found that I could connect without a problem when I disabled encryption, but when I re-enabled encryption I would either connect at 1Mbps or not at all. To resolve this problem I downloaded the latest driver from Intels site, uninstalled the Intel utility and let Windows manage my wireless connections. I than reset my router back to factory defualts as I had changed quite a few settings and I did not know which one(s) were casuing the problem. I than made one change at a time to see what caused my loss of connection. I found that my encryption was set to high, as I had it set to WPA2. Windos XP SP2 and above supports WPA2, but the wireless drive must also support it for it to support the passing of WPA2 capabilities to Windows Wireless Auto Configuration. This wireless card must not support if so I set my encryption level to WPA and I could connect just fine. I than changed my radio band to Wide - 40MHz and my connection speed dropped to 1Mbps. This card should work with wide as that is for N networks and this card is an N card, so I set the band back to Auto and my connection speed ramped back up to 54Mbps. I also changed the encryption algorithm from AES to TKIP. You will also need to change three settings in the wireless cards driver as well - From the Advanced tab of the wireless card driver, make the following changes: Power Management - Highest, Roaming Aggressiveness - Lowest, Power Saver Mode - Off. Also on the power management tab, disable power management.

FWIW, the Intel 5300 in my M4400 (same card as yours) supports WPA2.

I'm using WPA2 to connect to a "g" 2-wire 2701 router, and though I prefer TKIP (less intrusive polling) it connects fine with AES as well.

Default settings of Power Management - Highest, Roaming Aggressiveness - Medium, and Power Saving Mode - Off.

Latest Dell driver (12.0.0.82) but I uninstalled the included PROSet software.

You might try installing the Vista SP1 Wireless Feature Pack from the Dell downloads page for your system + OS; it seemed to help the stability of my WiFi as well as my BlueTooth connections.

I'm running a fresh install of Vista Business x64.

We have 802.11g wireless on our network and we had problems connecting to it and it's WEP encrypted.  This seems to work with the Intel 5100 card and I don't know if there is a setting for the Intel 5300 card for it or not, but you could look around and see if there is.

In device manager under network adapters double click on Intel(R) WiFi Link 5100 AGN, this will bring up the properties page.  On the advanced tab under the Property field scroll to the bottom option called Wireless Mode.  To the right of that there is a Value field, uncheck Use default value and from the drop down menu select 802.11b and 802.11g and hit OK and close device manager.

So for you instead of double clicking on the 5100 card, click on the 5300 card and there might be a setting for your card that could be use only 802.11n or something like that.  Try it and let me know.

Don't have all the details yet, but it sounds like the same issue we are having.  We have both E4300's and E6400's using the 12.0.0.82 driver that have no problem with ftp or pinging things by dns or ip but for some reason all http web browsing is very patch and intermittent.  It will work for 10 minutes then fail for 10 minutes.  During that time you can ping or ftp no problem by ip or dns.  even with dnsflush.  Also, the http problem is both LAN and WAN affected.  It is not a firewall issue (tested over and over again).  Help!  I haven't searched the forums that well so if someone has found a solution please link it!  More info: disabling wireless and hardlining into the wireless access points both dlink and linksys fixes the issue, so it definitely seems wireless related.

Thanks,

Zenworks911

Well, I bit the bullet and got a Belkin N (from Netgear G) which eliminated the whole router dropping and taking the network down.  It didn't completely fix losing that single node (the laptop with the Intel card).  I then used some of the fixes from Villanim, the big one being to download the driver from Intel, delete Intel's software, and let Windows manage the connection.  I then tweaked the settings on the card and it seems to be working.  (I did not switch from WPA2 since the other fixes worked).  Thanks to all who made suggestions.  This network novice has greatly benefitted from them.

This is what I did and so far it seems to have made it 95% better.  I tried updating the drivers, but that didn't seem to make any difference.

You will need to change this setting in the wireless cards driver  - From the Advanced tab of the wireless card driver, make the following changes: Power Management - Highest.

Hope that helps others.

Zenworks911

Just FYI - I found that the disconnects were due do with the fact that I used WEP encryption.  Once I reconfigured my wireless router and my laptop to use WPA2 encryption, the problem was solved.  The Dell engineer I worked with suggested that the encryption I was using was the culprit and he was right.

Hello,

have you all checked out this:

http://en.community.dell.com/forums/p/19253912/19449764.aspx#19449764

as we have the same problem, but the problem disappears when disabling the bluetooth adapter. So the problem occurs everytime the bt polls for devices or something like this.

brgds Daniel