Patchy wifi on 2 Asus devices

[alipmcg]

I have 2 Asus devices, one is a UX303 laptop which I've had about 18 months, the other is a T100 Chi tablet which I've just got, and I've experienced dodgy wifi on both. Both are running Win 8.1 and both have the most up to date wifi drivers.

Sometimes when I wake the UX303 from sleep the wifi adapter will report no available networks, and to get it to work I have to disable and then enable the controller under Device Manager. This always works, but it's annoying to have to do.

The tablet occasionally just loses internet connection on my wifi network (the status changes to 'Limited'), and I've no idea why that is. It usually comes back within 30 seconds. There were 2 bluetooth controllers installed when I did a system reset and I disabled one, hoping that would help, but it doesn't seem to have made a difference.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions I'd be really grateful. Thanks

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

ASUS uses cheap components in a broad range of their equipment. The only other device I would be suspicious of is your wireless access point or router. Sometimes those are flaky, so even when not using cheap wireless equipment, connections can be sporadic.

One or both of your devices probably has a port you could try a USB WiFi adapter in. Bypassing the built-in WiFi adapter and using a USB adapter should tell you if the built-in is the problem.

It's not unusual for wireless routers to have firmware updates. If you've never updated the firmware since purchase, it might be worth taking a peek at the manufacturers website to see if there have been any stability improvements since release.

One more thing to consider, if you're in an area with a high number of wireless networks, try switching the wireless channel your router is hosting the wireless network on. Too much congestion on one channel and your connections can suffer.

 

[alipmcg]

Thanks for the suggestions. I tried updating my router's firmware but it seems that's not possible. Also tried a wifi dongle with the tablet and reception is solid, so the problem must be with the built in wifi receiver or its drivers.

I'm currently trying to update windows on the tablet using the dongle. Updates have hitherto constantly failed because of the wifi going down part way through. Hoping that if I'm really lucky, this might even improve the wifi performance...

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Could also be the orientation of your devices. The orientation affects the device's internal antenna orientation in relation to your Wi-Fi connection point. If the antennas are badly oriented toward one another, you can have very bad performance indeed.

If you're device is close enough to an Ethernet port, such as on your router, another possibility may be to use a USB to Ethernet adapter and just wire it in for the purposes of updates, during which you may not be using the devices anyway and won't mind being tethered.

 

[alipmcg]

I ruled out orientation of the device as a possible cause, because the wifi signal would come and go even while the tablet is stationary.

Changing the wifi drivers from Broadcom to Microsoft seemed to stabilise the wifi connection, until I put the tablet to sleep and woke it, at which point it apparently lost connection (although the status didn't change to Limited). Found this solution in one of the first posts here (it's actually for the T100 series, not this model specifically):

http://www.transformerforums.com/forum/asus-transformer-book-t100-help/41759-wifi-tips-tricks-problems.html

Will try some more up to date MS drivers when I'm feeling strong and patient again

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

If the radio module inside your ASUS tablet is not replaceable, from the sounds of the reading at your link, you may be stuck with poor performance for the life of the device when using the built in wireless. Some issues can't be fixed with driver updates, and it sounds like the best they came up with was better, but not trouble free connectivity, by going back to an older driver release. The most reliable solution sounded like using a 5 GHz network, rather than 2.4 GHz, but that's not always an option.