What's wrong with my netbook's wireless?

June 17, 2009 10:21 PM

What's wrong with the wireless on my netbook and how can I fix it?

Does anyone know what could be wrong with the wireless internet on my EEE PC 900 HA netbook?

In both Windows XP SP3 (with drivers installed) and Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix I have been able to view wireless networks and connect to them. However, once I am connected to the network programs are either completely unable to get online. Internet Explorer gives me "No internet connection is available from this computer" messages, and Firefox just gives the standard "Page not found" notice. If they can connect, things download very slowly (we're talking around two minutes just to download the Google frontpage) and the connection only lasts for a few minutes before failing completely.

I've had problems both at home and on the wireless networks at my university and in public places. My home network is run on an AirPort Express with WPA2 Personal encryption. I've tried altering the encryption scheme but it doesn't seem to make any difference. I routinely use other wi-fi devices at home without any problems (discounting the crummy internet in my part of the world, which is another topic entirely...)

So any opinions as to what the problem is? Is it just crappy hardware, or is there something defective? I'm really eager to find a solution (preferably one that doesn't cost much), as without reliable wireless the netbook is pretty much useless, and the best I can hope for is to sell it at a loss.

Thanks in advance!

posted by fearthehat to technology (10 comments total)

Do you have these problems when wiring up your netbook directly via ethernet? (If it has that option)
Have you tried a USB wireless stick / 3G stick (from a friend). Does the internet still behave badly?
Basically you need to narrow this down to confirm that it's the wireless card, not something goofy with something else on the netbook.
posted by defcom1 at 11:40 PM on June 17

Ubuntu has major problems with the drivers for the wireless card on EEEPC HA. The wireless hardware is not supported by any Linux distro at this time. There are ndiswrapper workarounds, but these perform poorly compared to WinXP. If you want to keep this netbook (and use wireless) stick with booting into windows XP for now.
posted by prambutan at 11:48 PM on June 17

Hi, it works fine when connected by Ethernet. I don't know anyone with a USB wireless adapter to use unfortunately.
posted by fearthehat at 11:49 PM on June 17

My new 900A (what's the difference?) works fine. but for encrypted networks you need to go and set them up under network instead of wireless networks. i'm running the standard Xandros linux that came pre-installed, and i have an industrial strength AP, but no problem at all connecting over WiFi. it's slow, but i can't say that i've had any sort of wireless problems.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:37 AM on June 18

you say you are able to connect to the wireless network, but are you actually acquiring an IP address?
posted by namewithoutwords at 5:17 AM on June 18

If wired Ethernet works fine, then it's likely to be the wireless hardware, as you fear, not a software problem. You said that it also occurs in Windows XP, so it's not the Ubuntu drivers.

In this situation, I'd start by using ping. It's a simple command-line tool which sends a test packet to a specified IP address, waits for a response, and displays the round-trip time. It's a good tool for checking basic Internet connectivity.

After you connect to a wireless network, run "ping www.google.com" from the command line (or better yet, the IP address of your AirPort, if you can figure it out). On a working machine (in this case, my 2G Surf EEE), it should look something like this:

/home/user> ping www.google.com
PING www.l.google.com (74.125.155.99) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from px-in-f99.google.com (74.125.155.99): icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=34.1 ms
64 bytes from px-in-f99.google.com (74.125.155.99): icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=30.0 ms
64 bytes from px-in-f99.google.com (74.125.155.99): icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=29.9 ms
64 bytes from px-in-f99.google.com (74.125.155.99): icmp_seq=4 ttl=54 time=29.9 ms

--- www.l.google.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 29.982/31.039/34.175/1.822 ms

Based on your description, I'm guessing that ping will show dropped packets, and large and variable round-trip times.

My only other suggestion would be to turn off encryption entirely and see if it works any better.

Microsoft has a page on troubleshooting network problems.

A Google search shows that there's some related posts on the EEE user forums.
posted by russilwvong at 6:54 AM on June 18

Thanks for the replies so far. To reply to individual points-
- zengargoyle, I think the only difference is that the HA model has a HDD rather than a solid state drive.
- namewithoutwords, the netbook is able to acquire an IP address without any issues.
- russilwvong, I've tried pinging my router several times and it reports packet loss of between 30 and 60 percent each time, compared to 0 percent on my Mac. I did try looking on the EEEUser forums but couldn't find any solutions that seemed applicable.
posted by fearthehat at 1:52 PM on June 18

A packet loss rate of 30-60% means your connection is essentially worthless. Since it's happening in more than one environment and under multiple OSes, it's probably your hardware.
posted by chairface at 3:26 PM on June 18

Sounds like defective hardware to me. It's still under warranty, right? So you should be able to get it fixed for free.
posted by exphysicist345 at 11:04 PM on June 18

Thanks for the help everyone, it sounds like it is the hardware. I'll buy a Linux-compatible USB adaptor and see if I can use that to get online properly.
posted by fearthehat at 1:08 AM on June 19