I have a router on the first floor of my house, an extender on the second floor. With that setup, I have always had good Wifi reception in all corners of the house, on the front porch, and in the backyard. Just recently though, that reception sucks on my three year old Lenovo laptop. It remains fine on all other devices, even outside the house, including on my wife’s and daughter’s laptops and iPads. So I believe the issue is my laptop. Right now it only receives the signal when I am in the room with the router or the extender. It never used to be like this, so I’m not sure what changed?
At the same time, I keep getting messages from Lenovo to update the BIOS on that laptop. I have avoided doing so because I’m afraid I’ll fuck it up, and everything else seems fine.
Questions:
Would updating the BIOS help with the suddenly–sucky WiFi reception?
If not, what else could account for a laptop’s reception suddenly degrading?
my three-year-old laptop stopped seeing Wi-Fi at all and I determined the provided Wi-Fi card sucked and had probably stopped working properly, so I replaced it. The replacement was mostly successful.
Not saying that is what happened here but that was my issue!
Is it possible your laptop could be the only device still on the 2.4GHz band? Maybe there is some new wifi source or interference nearby which is ruining your signal just for one frequency?
That’s interesting. A while back I had dropped it, bad enough that a small corner of the case broke off, but otherwise it seemed fine. I never connected that with this. I guess there’s a way to open it up and find out?
Was it expensive?
I’m pretty clueless about how I could find out what band any of device or what the router offers. The router is at least three years old.
That sounds like a good clue. It’s probably not too hard to take apart a laptop, if you have some small screwdrivers and such. Look for the wireless card and the little antenna connectors to it. Maybe they came disconnected, or maybe the antenna wire is broken.
That kind of card is around $10 or less, so not expensive. The main issue with replacing it is opening the laptop once you’re sure you have removed all the screws. And making sure you don’t accidentally disconnect a cable without seeing it happen (and then not reconnecting it!). I bet you can find a youtube video of someone opening your specific laptop if you wanted some extra info on the process.
Indeed, found a 2 minute video of replacing the Wifi in precisely my model. And low and behold, the Wifi card is near the corner of right rear of the laptop, where I had dropped it a while back.
Now, I just have to actually open it open up and see if, in fact, it has become disconnected.
Kidding aside, the reason I wrote, “Now, I just have to actually open it open up and see if, in fact, it has become disconnected” is frankly that doing so scares the shit out of me. I know for you hardware folks that’s laughable. I am not a complete newcomer – I built two PCs including my current desktop – but for some reason fucking with a laptop gives me anxiety.
It’s not likely to be too difficult, just have all your tiny tools handy, and I recommend putting down a big strip of doubled (sticky-up) tape or some good containers for keeping the little screws organized. And a tiny non-metal prying tool like a Spudger, or something like a guitar pick or old credit card, to pry apart the case without marring.
Yeah, or something like chopsticks maybe. Do it where you have really good lighting, and review carefully to make sure you correctly unlock/lock all the little ribbon cable connectors
Success! I managed to open up the laptop and sure enough, one of the WiFi connectors was unconnected. Used my fingers, not tweezers, to reconnect it and now this thing is capturing both the router signal and the extender signal like never before. Sorry, no video set to Also Sprach Zarathustra. Thanks, folks, for the guidance.
