Howto: fixing Wi-Fi on Acer V3-371

john_smith
john_smith Member Posts: 4 New User
in 2015 Archives

I have been using Acer V3-371 for about a year now. The WiFi always worked bad, but after about 7 months it has gone from “sometimes does not work” to “sometimes works”. The signal sensitivity was as bad as you could imagine and in fact I could only get a stable reception and ping time while being within a couple meters from the router.

One thing I noticed while trying to fix touchpad was WiFi working fast and stable without the back cover. The back cover has a conductive copper coating inside. I looked up where WiFi antennas are and they were located each near a small window in the coating. Since at this point WiFi was working probably 30% of the time, I decided to give it a try and remove the coating to check how this affects WiFi reception.

Anyway, the coating is made of copper and is very thin, so it is easy to remove it using chemicals, specifically, ferric chloride (FeCl3). You can get it at a hobby store. How to do it:

  1. Carefully remove that film below HDD and black rubber blocks
  2. Place an electrical tape around the borders of the area you want to clean
  3. Cut some paper towels and place them to cover the area
  4. Pour a bit of ferric chloride onto the paper towel and wait for it to absorb it.
  5. Repeat until you are sure all the copper has a contact with FeCl3
  6. Wait for a 3-5 min
  7. Remove paper towels, wipe the back cover to remove remains of the coating, rinse it with water and dry it.
  8. Place back stuff you removed at step 1.

Here is my result:

oJ6S-arYUcg.jpg

You can see there are small remains of coating inside these square holes.

After that I assembled everything back and, surprisingly, WiFi started working again (even in Linux! I thought it was ath9k driver problem).

This solution is quite extreme and I do not recommend doing it if you haven't previously used ferric chloride. Also, nobody will be responsible for dissolved laptops and whatsoever. 

Categories