Very Poor Wireless Reception/Performance - Acer Aspire 5349

eysikal

My girlfriend owns an Acer Aspire 5349 laptop. She has complained about her computer not being able to connect to her wireless in her apt for months. She says the reception has gotten progressively worse and now only can connect when she is in a certain spot in her room. 

 

I finally got around to looking at it and couldn't figure out anything obviously wrong with the settings. The signal strength her laptop was getting was just mysteriously very low (1 or 2 bars). All of her roommates' and my laptop can connect just fine.

 

Because she also had some pesky malware, I decided to run a Acer system restore to see if that would help the wireless probelm at the same time. No dice. The problem remained. 

 

Ruling out software because of the system restore, I decided the problem had to be hardware. I bought a replacement WLAN module and opened up her machine and replaced it. STILL the problem remains. 

 

I'm running out of ideas. The thing just won't get good enough reception to connect. It still feels like a hardware issue to me...except now I don't know what it could be since I already tried replacing the wireless card. 

 

She's pretty bummed out and needs to be able to connect to wireless at school.What else I can do to try to fix this for her? 

finlux

Hi eysikal!

 

If you've replaced the wireless card (and updated the driver), the problem must lay with the wireless router itself.

 

There is a very slim chance that the wireless card you bought is faulty, but this is unlikely.

 

Can you (or her) try the laptop at other people's places, just to see if the problem is duplicated there? If the wireless still doesn't work, no matter where you go, then it will be the wireless card at fault.

 

Alternatively, you could disable the wireless card, and buy one of these to fit in a spare USB port.

 

Good luck, and let us know how you get on!