Intel’s Centrino range of wireless adapters have become some of the most highly used by OEM’s in the laptop world. Having integrated Wi-Fi within a laptop is the norm these days, so when buying a new PC, you shouldn’t expected to suffer from constant disconnections and limited speeds due to a year-long driver bug with a fix nowhere on the horizon.
Sadly this is what many Intel Centrino 6230/6235 users have suffered from and this isn’t something that has only just happened, the driver (or possible hardware issue) has now been going on for nearly a year for many consumers.
What happens for most users is that when they first buy their new laptops, they will straight away connect to their wireless network. Then usually within an hour of use, you’ll lose connection. Reconnecting with sometimes say that your network doesn’t exist, switching the Wi-Fi off and then on again will usually reconnect you, but you can expect the same thing to occur a few hours later.
This is most apparent when either downloading large files at high speed or when playing online games; disconnections or long sections of lagging will become the norm for many Centrino owners.
Now don’t get me wrong, not everyone who owns the two latest Centrino Wi-Fi adapters are falling prey to this issue, some of us have been lucky and have not updated the default drivers (Dated 2011!) that Microsoft includes in Windows 7 and 8.
These very old drivers seem to be the most stable, though because they are now nearing two years old they also miss out on many features that the Centrino adapter is trying to push such as WiDi amongst others.
You may be asking yourself why a driver issue is a big story, well my view is that with many consumers buying new PC’s from Samsung, Dell and others running Windows 8 and then finding out right from the get go that their machines are not doing the job they expected them to, Intel should be working to find out what is wrong.
Intel seem to be a little hush hush on their forums. Despite posting updates every few weeks stating that they are looking into the issue and that their latest driver update fixes disconnection issues for some users, they have now begun to blame OEM’s for not correctly seating the cards.
Blaming OEM’s such as Samsung and Dell seems pretty poor by Intel, especially when reverting the latest drivers back to Microsoft’s own albeit old ones keeps you on a stable connection; if card seating as the problem then stability would suffer no matter what driver you used.
For those of you who are having issues, as we have stated you can revert back to Microsoft’s own drivers by selecting your Centrino adapter in Device Manager and then uninstalling the driver and selecting the option to remove the driver files too; rebooting your PC should then automatically set you up with stable drivers.
The only other way to get stability is to go to the advanced section of the Centrino adapter in Device Manager and disable the 802.11n mode, something most of us don’t want to do for speed reasons.
So this leaves the ball in Intel’s court, consumers shouldn’t have to wait for a year to have a working driver from a company as big as Intel, especially with the problem happening on brand new Windows 8 laptops straight out of the box, many of which are being returned as faulty.
Via: Intel Forums