IT Gang - A place for tips and tricks

I had a little problem with my wireless network card. Every few minutes (sometimes 10-15 minutes, sometimes 1-2 minutes,...) the connection was dropping, and then it went up again in just a few seconds. Well, it doesn't sound too annoying, but believe me, it can get on anyone's nerves... It got on mine at least (after a couple of months of disconnect, connect, disconnect, "Wireless networks are in range", connect, disconnect, ... ... ... ).

So I did a little searching on Yahoo and found a few (ok, maybe a lot) of people having the same problem I have. The OS did not seem to have much to do with it, as I found people complaining about Debian and Ubuntu also. Still, the solutions presented were typical for forums nowadays: "buy new wi-fi card", "your router sucks, buy new one"...

So I started reading a Linux forum with some people asking for various config settings and debug tools to be posted from the "victim" machine. It went nice, I kinda understood what they were saying. And then somebody posts a log with a bunch of things I don't understand, the next post they say:

[quote]

[end quote]

(http://www.intellinuxwireless.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=813#c24)

And by that you mean exactly ... what? What ... a waste of time, cause' I did not understand a thing.

So I started over with my search and, eventually, someone wrote the magic words: "power saver mode". Ding!

What's the real problem? It seems that if you set your wi-fi adapter in power save mode = enabled, which basically means it will disconnect if you are not using the connection in order to save power, it will do just that - disconnect when you are not using the connection... Now you're probably arguing that (if this also happened to you as it did for me) you were browsing the net and then, suddenly got disconnected, no way you were not making traffic, even less not using the connection. LOL

Solution? Go to: Control Panel->System->Hardware tab->Device manager->Network adapters, find our wi-fi adapter and right click->Properties. In the Advanced tab you will see a list of item, and a box for the value of the selected item. Change "Power Save Mode" to disabled. ( I also changed "Minimum Power Consumption" to disabled since I only use AC power supply to save my battery life. I noticed after the change that I get a lot more low signal indications then previously - 2 red lines out of 4 - which might mean that the signal being too low and the minimum power consumption enabled, my wi-fi just disconnected in order to avoid using more power to amplify the signal...hmmm). Once this done, your network will be disconnected again and then reconnected, but this time it stays connected.

NOTE: If you are using your battery, you should be careful about the power consumption caused by this switch. It might drain a little more than you are expecting so take good care. You can always enable the settings while using battery, and then disable it when AC powered.