1370 poor connection quality

Question

Greetings,   I am in a classroom environment with a number of student notebooks connected with a wireless router.   All is well except for one student:  Inspiron 2200, internal 1370 mini-pci adapter.  The strength meter consistently shows his signal strength as 'very low' and sometimes he cannot connect at all.   But the router and the notebooks are in the same classroom (within 30 feet) and every other student has a signal strength of 'Excellent' and reported bandwidth of 54 mbps.  Same for the instructor (Inspiron 6000, Netgear wireless USB adapter).   So I'm convinced that the problem is with this one particular notebook rather than the router or other factors.   Any ideas?  Thanks.

MF1 · Answer

I bought an Inspiron 1300 with 1370 WLAN MiniPCI card for my son. In our house that new laptop is the only one to have serious trouble connecting to the wireless AP. Dell support were useless and the 90 day warranty expired without any real help.

Today I followed a link to Compaq ftp server where I found Broadcom driver and utility for (obviously essentially the same) wireless adapter used in Compaq and HP laptops.

Thanks to "somms" who, on 6/6/2005, provided:

P.S.: Latest drivers and WLAN utility for the 1350/1370/1450/1470 Truemobile are linked below:

ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp30001-30500/SP30380.exe
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp30001-30500/SP30380.txt

ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp30001-30500/SP30382.exe
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp30001-30500/SP30382.txt

I am sure that it is a bit late for your student, but maybe someone else will benefit from the above.

I am quite unpleasently surprised that Dell cannot get the driver and utility sorted out more than a year after Compaq have done it.

This Inspiron now has fantastic wireless performance!

Networking, Internet, & Bluetooth

1370 poor connection quality

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