Hardware or software problem? Laptop does not pick up

[Z-Bear]

About a month ago, the wireless card on my IdeaPad Y410 began to act strangely, to say the least. In an area with five or six different wireless networks, as shown by other devices or by my laptop before the weird stuff starts to happen, my laptop now will pick up one or two when I'm lucky, and no networks when I am not. Furthermore, most of the time the networks I pick up will only last a few seconds before mysteriously disappearing from the list.

To make the matters worse, my home wifi, which works perfectly before just about anywhere within the house, can only be reliably connected to within about 8 meters from the router. Anywhere further and the network will only be detectable for only a few seconds at a time.

Reinstalling drivers and Windows/Ubuntu does nothing to help with the situation.I am not trained in radio frequency engineering. So is this a hardware failure? If so, what type of hardware failure and what should I consider replacing?

 

[Carobthomp]

It's extremely common for other networks to disappear at random on your list of available networks due to the nature of how WiFi works, unless you never see any networks at all, I wouldn't focus on that concern.

For your home network however, typically range issues either arise from router location, band limitations (eg. 5 GHz networks not being able to go as far as 2.4GHz networks), or from the lack of power of the router itself.

 

[g90814]

Sounds like you might have several different issues.

1) choose a different channel on your router. Nowadays there are so many wireless routers in range of your average residence, you need to find the one with the least interference. You can use an app called 'wifi analyzer' if you have an android phone, or INSSIDER on a windows computer.

2) your wireless router may be too weak or going bad, you might want to look at replacing it.

 

[Z-Bear]

The weird part is this stopped happening after I uninstalled VMWare. Don't ask me why.