General Wifi Help

b9chris

The Aspire R7 may have a wifi driver problem or hardware problem. To isolate it you should try to eliminate the usual things that make any wifi problematic. If your wifi only works very close to the router, you probably have a general wifi problem covered below. Here's some general wifi advice:

 

If you have a smartphone you can install a wifi analyzer app for free, like Wifi Analyzer on Android; iPhone likely has a free one as well. On your laptop you can install InSSIDer. With any of these, wander your house or apartment and you'll see your SSID rise as you approach your wifi router, and fall as you walk away. When other wifi SSIDs rise near or above yours, you should expect bad signal or the total inability to connect in that area of the place.

 

When you find other SSIDs are crowding you out, you can do a few things to resolve it:

 

1) Move the SSID over a channel. There are 14 channels available on wifi. If you find for example channel 1 is crowded but channel 7 is empty, moving your SSID over should do the trick. To do this you'll need to learn how to login to the Admin webpage for your router, requiring the admin username and password. Typically this info is in your router manual. (As an aside, if your admin password is still "password," you should really change it - viruses like to attack this webpage and infect your router).

 

2) Some routers are designed to search for the most open frequency and use that; that means every channel tends to be crowded in an apartment building. One solution here is to move over to the 5Ghz range. This range isn't very well known to novice wifi users, so it tends not to have many people broadcasting on it. The Aspire R7 does support the 5Ghz range - but it has 2 drawbacks: The 5Ghz range is shorter range with more interaction with human bodies (walking in front of the router can kill the signal), and many devices (including many smartphones and the Wii) don't support it.

 

3) Move the router - this one's obvious.

 

4) Talk your loudest neighbors into sharing wifi, either by paying them to use theirs or asking if they'd like to use yours in exchange for shutting theirs down.