|
| News | Profile | Code | Photography | Looking Glass | Projects | System Statistics | Uncategorized |
Blog |
I'm really not sure what prompted it, but ever since I've been in NJ (for the holidays), the Wi-Fi on my Eee PC 900 has been less than stellar.
What is less than stellar? PL and very high latency over a 10-15 second duration, almost every minute. It's not a signal strength issue - wavemon indicates a signal level of roughly -55 dBm, an SNR of +39 dB, and a link qualty of 40/70. The packets either get queued somewhere and are processed after 4-8 seconds, or lost completely. The orientation of the Eee seems to have an impact on this behavior, too, but it all seems circumstantial. I can even be 1 meter away from the AP and still get PL.
I didn't drop the Eee, or anything like that. I did have to run it through security at the Charlotte Airport before I left, though. The conspiracy theorist in me says there's more going on in there than just x-rays!
I initially thought this was just the WRT54GS at my parents' place not playing nice with the Atheros AR2425 chip in the Eee. However, two other laptops, including my IBM T42 with an Atheros AR5212, have no problems. I even brought the Eee it to public Wi-Fi hotspot (the Omega Diner, in North Brunswick) and experienced the same issue. Back in Charlotte, my Cisco 1232 AP at home, whatever AP they have at Panera, and the Cisco Airspace stuff at work all worked great with the Eee. Nope, not an AP issue.
It's not a software problem. The problems started happening in NJ. I haven't rebooted the laptop in two weeks - and I just suspended to RAM before boarding the plane, and resumed when I got to my destination. Of course, I did reboot after that, to make sure it wasn't something transient. Took the battery out, did the whole power cycle yadda yadda. I didn't upgraded any drivers or kernel modules. I ended up trying that, though - no dice.
So, what's left? Firmware problem? I didn't touch it -- although I'm not sure how to flash the firmware on the Atheros card. Perhaps it's an antenna problem? Maybe antenna diversity is confgured by default (didn't see an iwpriv ioctl for it), and the Tx antenna got bumped, or something. If so, that would explain how signal quality was great, yet packets get dropped. So I opened it up:
See the entire gallery here.
So, I jostled the antenna connectors, and that didn't help. However, I ended up breaking something because the tilda (~/`) key is gone, now. Gone, as in it's now assumed the role of the F1 key, and all the other function keys have shifted down one. I re-seated the keyboard connector several times, but to no avail. My ~/` key is now dead.
BAH.
Yeah, I bought a new Eee PC. I can't believe I did it. However, it works. I swapped the SSD and my 2GiB RAM upgrade, and booted it up. The wireless works as expected, and the ~/` key lives again.
I'm going to do some more hacking on the old Eee when I get back from vacation, because I'm really curious about the whole thing - and worried that whatever happened to it might plague my new Eee in the future. Getting a 3rd Eee is NOT an option.
So there you have it. Sorry that the story didn't have a better ending. At least you got a chance to take a peep at some nekkid Eee photos. :-S
Hey, at least I put it back together! And, the keyboard started working again the next day - but the Wi-Fi is still flaky. Warranty would have fixed it in a month or two, but I'm too impatient, unfortunately
Also, I'm not a bad person, really :)
I'll let you off since you put it back together :)
I too am guilty of the impatience thing.
New comments are currently disabled for this entry.
     |
This HTML for this page was generated in 0.002 seconds. |
Intrigued as to why you would kill such an innocent little Eee and strip it of it's dignity whilst, presuming that, it was still in warranty.
You monster ;o)