Asus A53SV loses connectivity upstairs after sleep

[dweezil20]

Hello all,

This is a reasonably long issue, apologies for the length.

Major symptom: Maddeningly intermittent wireless issues with Asus laptop after repair. Unable to connect to network after sleep or reboot on upper floors of house.

History:
1) Laptop wireless was working fine but power jack and case were damaged.
2) Sent away to Asus for free repair (pulled the HD first).
3) Got it back and seemed fine, but...


Problem:
Wireless starting dropping after sleep. It's my wife's laptop and she usually uses it on the 2nd floor of the house. Routers are on the first floor. It failed the same way on both my G and N routers.
Played with all sorts of settings, disabled IPv6, reinstalled drivers, checked for BIOS update. No luck . Eventually saw some event log entries that might have been associated with a bad wifi card. Ordered a
new Intel 100 N (OEM model) and replaced card, same issues. Swapped card with a Broadcom 1510 from an old Dell I had. Same problem. Tried more settings, static IP, flushing DNS, etc. Same problem.
At this point the event log has nothing notable in it, no error logs anywhere the wireless card will just report no connectivity.

Here's the maddening part, when I work on this laptop I take it down into my office, which is on the 1st floor by my router. The laptop works flawlessly there (10 feet from the router). So my
theory at this point is that Asus damaged or otherwise messed up the laptop antenna while repairing the laptop. I can't easily physically verify this, as the antenna wires delve deep into the case
and I suspect into warranty voiding territory.

Here's where I get confused, most of the time on the 2nd floor the windows wifi icon reports a perfectly good signal, and if I boot the laptop on the first floor and walk upstairs, the laptop works fine
(as long as I don't reboot or let it go to sleep). If the antenna were the problem, wouldn't I expect a low signal at all times and problems at all times?

Does anyone have any ideas on further debugging this? Perhaps a utility that reports wifi signal quality or more detailed information about acquiring a connection? Or perhaps a deeper understanding
of how wifi connections are acquired. Without more info it seems like I have three choices:
1) Reinstall windows and see if that fixes it (not terrible)
2) Pull apart the laptop and try to check the antenna (fun; might work; wife might be pissed if it fails; Asus doesn't share repair manuals either)
3) Call Asus and complain (even if this works, I'm probably looking at $40 shipping and 5 weeks; plus an hour or more on hold with some offshore guy)

Thanks!

 

[Emerald]

check the power setting for the network card.

there should be a setting to shut off network card to save power, disable it

 

[dweezil20]

check the power setting for the network card.

there should be a setting to shut off network card to save power, disable it

Sorry forgot to add that detail. I did that (with both the 100 N card and the 1510 card), same problem. Good call though, I was really hoping that would have handled it.

 

[dweezil20]

Best answer selected by dweezil20.

 

[dweezil20]

So an update on this. I have two wireless routers, previously one was on channel 5 and one on channel 6. I switched the 6 to use 11 instead. That fixed everything except a nagging issue acquiring IP address sometimes. After hard coding the IP address and generally sticking to my G router, this is functionally reasonably well. The signal is still usually missing after sleep.

I discussed this with a co-worker and we theorized that the repair guys probably did mess up the antenna somehow, causing the laptop to get a noisier (but not necessarily less) signal. We believe actually syncing the initial conversation with the router is the hardest part, and would be most adversely affected by a noisy signal.

I may end up reinstalling the OS and shopping around for a replacement wireless antenna to see if either perfectly solves the problem. I'll try to remember to update this if i do...