Thinkpads Forum

Four out of six of my X61s / X61T glitch in what appears to be a wireless-related way. Although not conclusive, on one glitch, the machine managed to spit out, "lost connection, attempting to reconnect", before it froze.

The glitches are all identical: a complete freeze, requiring hard reboot. There is no damage to the file system, no lost data, no data corruption, no screen corruption.

Each machine can accomplish complicated things, such as massive Windows updates via wireless, without glitching, yet may glitch on light activity related to the web.

It might seem strange that I find this tolerable, but I've never lost a document. Only wireless activity is affected. It is almost infrequent, though it should never happen.

The adapters are 5 of Intel 5300, and 1 Intel 5100. The three tablets run W7. The notebooks run W8.1. All machines have 8G of RAM. The Intel wireless drivers are up to date.

My three W500, and a T400, are not affected. They never glitch.

All of the machines have come into use over the period of time in which I installed two Asus RT-AC66U routers. This is a state-of-the-art n/ac router. Only the 5 gHz band is used, with the house serviced by two routers on two separate bonded-channel pairs. The router firmware is up to date. No change in occurence has been noted with:
a. Intel driver releases.
b. Asus firmware releases

Other than the glitches, the speeds are good. No connectivity problems have been noted, except for the occasional freezes.

The tablet I take to NY to sketch with never glitches away from the house.

MY first gen Centrino laptop, with a now-ancient Intel adapter, a 2200 B/G had a similar glitch. If the CPU usage went to 100% with heavy wireless use, the laptop would freeze. Perhaps high CPU load incites an Intel bug.

Shared experience appreciated.

I have a dual band router. The T410 has dual band Wlan. I tested the speed of my internet and wireless 5Ghz. I had throughput of 8.5mb on a download. Not megabits but megabytes. I didn't even think my router could do 70mbps. That is an average download speed of 8.5mb for a 10GB download. This is over an intel Wlan card.

Please, keep this thread about glitches/crashes/freezes. Thank you.

The only laptop in my household with the Intel wireless card (6200) is also the only system which has glitches when it comes to wireless connection to the router. However, these glitches are mostly along the lines of losing connectivity after the machine has been put to sleep.

The router in question (dual-band Engenius, top-of-the-line at one time) is Atheros-chipped which I suspect might be a part of the problem.

I've never experienced exactly what you're describing, though.

Which wireless cards are in the laptops (T400/W500) that are not misbehaving?

The W500/T400 have the same cards, Intel 5300.

Correction: only one of the X61s is affected. I swapped every component in the machine, including the motherboard, and, needless to say, the wireless card, excepting: bluetooth module, keyboard, touchpad, and screen. Of course, with eBay parts, this proves nothing. Perhaps I was sold another defective motherboard.

But if it wasn't wireless, I would expect some other manifestation. For example, one tablet is habitually used for sketching with Artrage and Painter 2015. This is a very CPU intensive activity, driving up the temps and draining the battery. It has never misbehaved in this activity. Yet it glitched the other day, in the same room with the access point, line of sight. The scenarios are:
large file transfer, high bit rate video. The temperatures rise with video, but not with large file transfer.

Intel wireless glitches Intel wireless. Get a non-whitelist containing BIOS and replace it with Atheros.

Haven't seen wifi chipset compatibility with routers occur since 2008, the rule of thumb should be stick with mid-range routers and/or upgrade the removable antenna if necessary. Factor in age of a router and it could be on its last legs, Netgear WNDR 3x00 has a history of the heat build up damaging the antenna RoHS solder mount and the antenna range drops to 5-10 feet when it finally fails. My parents went through three of them and finally jumped to a completely different model with more air vents.

I've only encountered Intel 1000N cards overheating and crashing a few Dell & HP notebooks. Only weirdness I've seen with a T61/T400/500 era Intel 5300 card is if an IRQ fault occurs Windows 7/8/8.1 can and will BSOD or unrecoverable freeze--only resolution is use the Vista/7 driver from Toshiba which you can manually set the IRQ(Microsoft's certified driver uses a virtual IRQ but is the cause of the issue & there is an odd bug in the Lenovo driver too). There was a post on Microsoft Windows support usergroup forum on the Windows 8/8.1 BSOD, I'm shocked the OP didn't stumble upon it.

My R51 (Intel 2200BG) has substantial connection issues while both X31 (Atheros) and ThinkPad 8 (Broadcom) don't. Still the ethernet cable is the best option Router is older TP-LINK TL-WR543G.

I have an X200 with Intel 5100 and it runs totally fine with my ASUS RT-N56U router on either band. OTOH, I have 5 ThinkPads all with Intel 6205 cards which seem to drop connection on 2.4Ghz frequently and I was starting to think I should replace with a 5*** series card to see if that works better. Or, go back to my Netgear WNDR3700 router to see what happens. Luckily I do not get a freeze, just connection drops on 2.4Ghz. So, I stick with 5Ghz and all is fine.

Is there a source on non-whitelist bioses for later
machines (T420, W510, etc.)?