Venue 11 Pro: My WiFi adapter dies ever night!

DSF3G, which model DVP11 do you have? I have a 5130 and regularly have it plugged in and sleeping over night, most of the time the wifi connection automatically reconnects successfully on wakeup. I'm on firmware A04 and the network adapter driver is listed as a "Dell Wireless 1538 a/g/n adapter", and details show "Qualcomm Atheros", driver date of 09/29/2013, driver version 3.7.3.45425.

  - Woody

Exact same driver version that I have.

And I've also got a Baytrail tablet.

Firmware? To find out, charm bar -- > search -- > msinfo32 , run it, 11th line in summary page "BIOS version". Mine shipped with A03, I had to update it to A04.

 - Woody

I've got A04 also.

I checked the System Event log and found this: Just before my NIC is disabled, my system logs a series of 4294, TCPIP errors with the description reading:

"An attempt to clear a packet coalescing filter on the network adapter with hardware address 88-12-4E-01-E7-5B has failed (IPv4 0xc023002f 6)."

These are followed by a 100002 Warning:

"WLAN Extensibility Module has stopped.

Module Path: C:\Windows\system32\athihvs.dll"

At which point, I believe my NIC dies.

This seems to happen about once per day, based on the event log entries.

If you have time, maybe you can have Dell support look into it, they could remote into your machine, at the very least, have them register the issue in their system.

 - Woody

If you have time, maybe you can have Dell support look into it, they could remote into your machine, at the very least, have them register the issue in their system.  - Woody

Have you tried connecting to another WIFI router to see if the same problem occurs?    You may want to check to make sure your router has the latest available firmware.   What type of router are you using and do you have any problems like this with any other WIFI devices or just the Venue 11?

Have you tried connecting to another WIFI router to see if the same problem occurs?    You may want to check to make sure your router has the latest available firmware.   What type of router are you using and do you have any problems like this with any other WIFI devices or just the Venue 11?

Since the issue only seems to happen once a day or so, and late at night, it's going to be hard for me to test with another router. That said, I did update the firmware on my router a couple of days ago, and I haven't seen the issue since. Keeping my fingers crossed that it's fixed, though I'm not sure why a router firmware update would fix something like this.

dsf3g,

Does your adapter have a Power Management setting? If yes, uncheck the box, allow Windows to turn off this device to save power.

What channel and type of security are you using in your wireless router? If you're not sure, run Network Interface and post the results back here.

Rick

Thanks, Rockstar Rick. Alas, I'm not seeing a "Power Management" tab when I open the NIC properties in Device Manager. And my router is running WPA2-PSK security.

The odd thing is that after updating the firmware on my router, I found that I had to do a factory restore to get it working again properly and even though I used the same settings as before when I re-configured it, only about half my devices connected automatically. I had to re-connect the others manually by deleting the old connection settings and re-adding the network and key. 

dsf3g,

I know there were 2 Windows Updates that were causing connection problems, KB2903939 and KB2907595

Uninstalling these updates, the connections worked.

Rick

The problems that were caused by the Windows Updates (dead WIFI) have been resolved by Microsoft, so provided that your WIFI works at all, that wouldn't be the cause any longer.    

One other thing to try - please download and save the latest WIFI driver to your desktop, then uninstall the old one and restart your tablet.   Install the new one and then restart again.   

If you are still seeing the problem, can you go into the driver properties for the 1538 card in device manager, click on Details, then select the Power Data item and tell me what the "Current Power State" says?   Do this when it isn't working.

Brian -

I reproduced the problem for you so I could check the Current Power State. I found that it is D0. The power state is D0 also when the wireless adapter is working, so I am not sure this tells us anything.

I found an easy way to duplicate the problem or to avoid it. I have my 5130 set so it never goes to sleep, but the screen turns off after 30 minutes idle. If I leave Google News running all night, then the wireless does not go into a coma. I think this is because Google News refreshes itself every few minutes so it exercises the wifi connection. If I do not leave anything running, the wifi adapter reliably goes into a coma within 3 hours. I can tell this is the case because my overnight backup program fails to run at 1am.

In the morning after the wifi fails, the wifi connection usually still shows the status "Connected," but sometimes (about 1/3 of the mornings) it shows "Limited." But the functionality is equally lacking either way. When I launch the browser to any web site, I get "This page can't be displayed". Usually I can fix this by clicking the button labeled "Fix connection problems", or by turning wifi off and on in the charms bar. Sometimes (about once a week) this doesn't work, and I have to go into Device Manager and disable and enable on the 1538 Driver tab.

In any case, if I fail to leave Google News (or something else that exercises the connection) running, my overnight backup routine always fails, so this is a bad thing. I also find that if I leave the device idle for a long period at any other time day or night, the wifi does the same thing, goes into a coma and needs to be revived before the browser will work.

Update: When I click the "Fix connection problems" button, it runs through some tests and in the "resolving problems" phase it reports that it is resetting the network adapter. After "Troubleshooting is completed" it reports the following:

Problems found:
The connection between your access point, router, or cable modem and the internet is broken. - Detected.
The default gateway is not available - Fixed

After this, the wifi is back to life and the browser, email, and backup all work fine.

So I suppose it is fixing the problem the same way I do, except I can do it faster. If there is anything else I can check for you, please let me know.

I have already uninstalled and reinstalled all the drivers in the order you have specified elsewhere, and all are up-to-date. the Dell Wireless 1538 driver is at 3.7.2.45425.

PaulInBellevue, sorry I didn't know this was happening on multiple routers for you, that would have been helpful to know.

 - Woody