Question Asrock z490 Taichi wireless questions

[NadeMagnet69]

New PC build here, my first so I'm not quite sure what I'm doing when it comes to setting up a new PC. I own this MOBO and was under the impression it came with full wireless since it says it comes with an Intel Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax adapter. But I had to throw in my wireless pci card from my old pc to get here to ask this since no wireless networks showed up until I installed the old card.
Is what the taichi comes with only for wireless LAN and cabled ethernet?
If so is there a way for wireless LAN to connect to a wireless router?
If I'm stuck with my old PCIe card instead, what do you guys recommend for fast internet? I want to get every bit of speed I can out of my at&t u-verse router.
How do I check the brand and capabilities of my current PCIe wireless card? lol I got it like 8 years ago and have no idea what it is.
Should I use my taichi's antenna in place of the two small ones that are on my old card at least?
Thanks in advance

 

[Lutfij]

If this is your motherboard, then yes you get a wireless adapter out of the box. If I were you, I would make sure you're on the latest BIOS update for the motherboard. Since you're not me, I'd suggest that you try and install the wireless adapter drivers for the board(while the old adapter is removed from the board) from the board's support site.

I'd advise not mixing and matching components, use that which was bundled with the board. Antenna's included.

 

[kanewolf]

New PC build here, my first so I'm not quite sure what I'm doing when it comes to setting up a new PC. I own this MOBO and was under the impression it came with full wireless since it says it comes with an Intel Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax adapter. But I had to throw in my wireless pci card from my old pc to get here to ask this since no wireless networks showed up until I installed the old card.
Is what the taichi comes with only for wireless LAN and cabled ethernet?
If so is there a way for wireless LAN to connect to a wireless router?
If I'm stuck with my old PCIe card instead, what do you guys recommend for fast internet? I want to get every bit of speed I can out of my at&t u-verse router.
How do I check the brand and capabilities of my current PCIe wireless card? lol I got it like 8 years ago and have no idea what it is.
Should I use my taichi's antenna in place of the two small ones that are on my old card at least?
Thanks in advance

First thought --- did you connect the plastic antenna to the back of the motherboard ? If not, then you have no functional WIFI.

 

[NadeMagnet69]

"did you connect the plastic antenna "
lol Of coarse I installed the antenna. It just screws right on. It can even fit the old PCIe card which is why I was asking if I should use it.

Here's the weird part about the drivers. The MOBO comes with a drivers/utilities dvd. But I can't for the life of me run it. Installing the optical is just a matter of plugging in sata power and data cables. When I put the dvd in my dvd optical drive, it doesn't autorun it like normal. When I double click on it in "this pc" it just ejects it. I tried booting off it, didn't work and it just bypassed it in the boot order and booted windows normally. I right click on the drive with the dvd in it and click properties, it says file system unknown, used space, free space, and capacity, is all 0 bytes. I tossed in a couple of old game cd's and it could read them just fine. Windows should have the needed drivers to run an optical drive, plus windows is now current in its updates which I did after getting online with the old pcie card. It could read the dvd manual of my new LG monitor just fine. So I'm at a loss. It's like they sent a blank dvd with this MOBO.

But now that I'm online I can at least go to asrock's site and update the drivers from there so I'm going to do all those I find there, unplug my old pcie card, and see if I still get wireless networks to show up.

Thanks for confirming that it should have normal wireless. I'll update this thread with my results.

 

[kanewolf]

lol Of coarse I installed the antenna.

You would be surprised at the number of people that go "OH so that's what that is for!!" ..

 

[NadeMagnet69]

lol That's kinda like leaving the lens cap on the camera and not knowing why the pics didn't turn out.

 

[NadeMagnet69]

Weird. So I just unplugged the old pci card in preparation to install all the new drivers and I decided to reboot to see what happens. It now works even without the new drivers installed. I don't know what happened. I had clicked on "show available networks" in network & internet settings before I posted my original question and no networks would show up. I tried a few other things but could only find the ethernet adapter. I mean I'm not a total newb, I've been using PC since the 80s and DOS. I've just never built one before now. But whatever happened at least it's working now. I'll still install all the new drivers though.

Any thoughts on the DVD issue? What asrock has posted is just the updated programs and drivers. But that doesn't mean that the disk doesn't have any that have no new updates so I really want to know what the deal is with it. Have you ever heard of a blank DVD accidentally getting tossed in a box and being sent out?

 

[bill001g]

Windows has some generic drivers that work ok for many people. Not always the best option but they mostly work. The drivers from the chipset vendor tend to be the most current.

You want to disable windows ability to update your drivers....well maybe disable windows automatic windows update too.

 

[NadeMagnet69]

Speaking of drivers, I went to my folks house and tried the DVD on my mom's laptop and it ran it just fine. I had a thread going on asrock's forum and support said the DVD might be corrupt. Clearly that's not the case. So I searched online for drivers for my optical, founds some, tried them all and windows says the current driver is the latest. I still can't get that darn disk to run for me. The optical is called TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-224BB in the device manager. Asrock confirmed that I don't need to run the disk to get the latest, they have them on their site. But I still want to solve this puzzle on why I can't run this simple DVD when I can run other DVD like my LG manual and game CD's. Yet my mom's ancient laptop (lol it can't even handle running adobe and constantly crashes) can run it. Any thoughts?

 

[NadeMagnet69]

I just went through my old email confirmation for my last PC that was a prebuilt from ironside computers but all it says is "Optical Drive DVD Writer" so I can't get a brand name better than what's in the device manager. All it says on the outside is "Super Writemaster DVD multi recorder." Searching for that and it looks like it might be a Samsung optical drive. But Samsung was one of the drivers I found from searching "TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-224BB" which as I said wasn't a driver windows would let me install since it says I already have the latest driver.