[prowler351]

My wifi signal has become much weaker than what it used to be on my laptop (Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q701). From both my workplace and my home (so different routers. Ones an N and other is G) my signal has went from being great, to not being able to connect from just 2 rooms away so it's not the routers or interference from other devices as I've checked that and tried changing the channels.My cell phone can pick up my wifi much better than my laptop can now.It will read out at 70 dBm on my cell phone when my laptop won't even be able to pick up a signal. Any ideas on the matter?

I'm not positive,but I know it happened sometime close to when I upgraded from windows Vista to Windows 7, but I have the latest driver for it. I can't place right when this happened because most of the time I'm within one room of the router so it still ran.

[prowler351]

106 views and not a single comment or suggestion. I guess the masses are stumped. My only guess is that the antenna has somehow shorted out or disconnected. I suppose I'll take my laptop apart and have a look.

Anyone know of a nice place to buy a good internal laptop wan card?

[arknorth]

I would check the hinge point between your screen and the body of the laptop - since you noted that you use the beastie often in two places, that usually means you're opening and closing the lid constantly. In most newer models, the antenna wire run around the screen, but feeds back into the base through a tiny access hole, usually in the left hinge. This can wear out the wire.

A-N

[managed]

This should help with the laptop disassembly :- http://www.irisvista.com/tech/laptop...assembly-1.htm

It could be easier to just buy a PCMCIA wireless card though

[joshka89]

I had issues when upgrading to 7 with my wireless as well.

What kind of card is in the laptop? Linksys or what?

For me the best solution was to not install the wireless drivers from its specific manufacturer but to instead allow windows to auto-detect and install the generic Broadcom drivers. Worked wonders for me.

[prowler351]

Spot on Arknorth. After I took it apart I found that the mentioned spot was worn pretty much entirely through the wiring but instead of it being just from normal use, it was because it was ran on the wrong area by the hinge so it was being pinched all of the time.

I managed to actually splice in more wire and solder the wiring up without shorting it out or making it to fat to fit and my wi-fi is back to running great now.

I'm not going to recommend a Toshiba laptop to anyone until I know they've changed their manufacturer assembly practices. This is actually my third laptop of this model. I had to take the first back because the shielding under the keyboard was installed so far off it was stopping you from opening and closing the dvd-rom tray, the second one had a bad video card so the screen only came on half the time(both these were taken back within week of purchase), and now this one had the wiring laid improperly and caused my reception problems. $1500 should get you something that's at least assembled correctly. There's not that many parts inside.

Thanks for the help guys.

[joshka89]

Glad to see you fixed it.
I've got two Toshiba laptops
Satellite P505
and another smaller Satellite

they'r really nice and have no assembly problems.
Maybe i'm just luck though

[prowler351]

Maybe I'm just unlucky and the first run of this model was half-assedly(I can make up words right?) assembled. I got all three of these within the first few weeks of release.

[arknorth]

Toshiba may have been the first with a 'modern' laptop style, but they have always been an oddilty in my book, even when I was selling them. It started with them modifying the OS for their own power systems (Sony does this as well), and just only got stranger.

Good to see that you fixed your problem - I know of a few folks who have actually replaced that wire with a thinner gauge so that they can stuff their bezels full of it to increase their range.

And yes, we'll have to add 'assedly' to our dictionaries!

A-N