Aspire ES1-512 Atheros AR 956x wireless drops connections, loses routers, or fails (Code 10, 12)

For several months now, the wireless network adapter on my Acer Aspire ES1-512 laptop running Windows 8.1 has become erratic and unreliable. Device Manager indicates Qualcomm Atheros AR956x Wireless Network Adapter as the device.

Behaviors:
1) Drops wireless connection randomly during Skype calls, video streaming (browser), or general activity.
2) Sometimes seems to lose wireless settings, i.e. knowledge of default router to connect to automatically; router list comes up, and previous default must be chosen and configured again.
3) Device Manager variously reports Code 10 or Code 12 failures.

For a while, the only successful workaround I could use was to fully-reinstall the device driver (version 10.0.0.288 from 4/2/2014). When that wouldn't work for more than an hour or a day before the failures would resume, I finally did a recovery install of Windows itself. That required numerous Windows Updates to become current, and a short time after that completed, the issue returned.

Has something changed in Windows recently? Why are these problems happening now? Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot these failures more effectively?
Thanks

Accepted answers

All comments

aphanic

I'm not sure... it could be driver related.

Please give the ones attached to this computer a try, Atheros cards (Qualcomm now) have been picky with me years ago regarding how they worked, various problems depending on the drivers in use. I hope these fixes something for you.

Atheros Drivers.rar

FrankHz

I was unable to successfully use the .RAR file you posted, Aphanic (thank-you very much!). I used 7-zip to explode the RAR into a local directory on the Aspire laptop, but when I attempt the .\setup.bat command in Admin PowerShell, I'm getting the error "This app can't run on your PC" while attempting to execute the first pnputil command. My laptop and OS are 64-bit (Win 8.1). Should pnputil.exe be compatible? (Sorry I don't have much experience dealing with driver files).

aphanic

Ohhh! 8.1! I thought you were on 10, my bad, try the ones I uploaded now.

And you can install them from the Device Manager too (those are old screenshots I had from a graphics card, you should select the device under "Network adapters", but the process is the same):

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/jc/hxyf0hhlcw4r.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/sv/izrr68b3yzge.png

Atheros.rar

FrankHz

Thanks for the quick response. I was just reading up on pnputil and thinking through what else I could try on my own.

Downloaded your second .RAR file and extracted the 8.1 folder to my Wireless Drivers directory. I used the Update Driver option from the Properties page of the device in the Device Manager, as you suggested, and that worked fine. A hard restart brought up the system with wireless enabled, and seemingly working well.

I then re-booted the machine a second time with the following result:
- wireless was slow to connect to the router (message to the effect "...taking longer than expected"), and it ultimately failed ("Checking Network Requirements then "No connections are available").

Rebooted a third time, and wireless would not come up at all (device disabled). Properties of the device in DeviceManager indicate "This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12) If you want to use this device, you will need to disable one of the other devices on this system."

Then tried the following: changed the Power Management setting from "High" to "Balanced". My thought was that the driver issue might be caused by some race condition with other software on the machine.
- Wireless came up fine after the first restart.
- Put the laptop to sleep and after wakeup and log-on, the machine did not come up immediately with wireless working; after a few seconds, wifi indicated it was not connected (Not connected- Connections are available). Clicking on the wireless icon displayed the expected list of available routers. Machine successfully connected (I was expecting to have to re-select the preferred router to attempt a connection, it it seemed to recover and connect in less than a minute).

- Attempted a second restart, and wireless was available pre-login. Remained available after successful login.

It's a bit hard to tell whether we've solved an underlying problem completely. My current theory remains that there is likely to be some race condition involving an interaction of the wireless driver with other software on the machine. I'll keep the Power Management setting at "Balanced" and see if the wireless issues reappears. I'll repost after a day or two.

Thanks so much for the update to the wireless driver!

FrankHz

Update on this wireless driver situation after several days with the modified 8.1 drivers installed:

The laptop worked reasonably well initially and for nearly two days, but now we've fallen into the rabbit hole again: the machine has difficulty establishing or sustaining any wireless connection (even when situated next to the router); repeated Code 12 (lack of resource) failures; neither soft or hard startups seem to have any effect (machine comes up with the device disabled in Device Manager due to Code 12 failure).

Tried multiple other things:
1) Initiated an "Update Driver" on the wireless adapter, which had the effect of re-installing the older (2014) drivers from earlier; then re-applied the 8.1 drivers. No impact.
2) Completely removed the wireless adapter device via Device Manager and deleted driver files. After subsequent reboot, installed the 8.1 device drivers and re-enabled the adapter. No change.
3) Modified the Start list via Task Manager to eliminate as many things as possible (there were only 3 or 4, but I disabled the one that was listed as High impact). No change.
4) Removed the Skype application. This was a bit of a shot in the dark, but this app is a pain. Even when it is not supposed to starting on boot-up, it seems to be doing things

I have yet to find anything that will make the wireless function on this machine more predictable or reliable.

Can anyone suggest other ways to determine what is the underlying cause of these driver problems?

aphanic

Just got to the thread again, I've been swamped with other things lately, I apologize.

So the drivers for 8.1 didn't do any good either huh... It's an old-ish card, and as Windows advances forwards incompatibilities with older drivers can arise, I wonder if that has anything to do with it. Unfortunately, PC manufacturers won't certify newer drivers, nor will they test with newer versions of the OS for older machines.

A solution could be to just replace the Atheros card with a more modern one. As solutions go it's kind of a last ditch option, but it ought to fix the problems right away. If you want to go that route, I think your card is of the half-mini PCIe type, but a picture of it should be enough to know for sure, and if that's the case and you feel like going through that route we could look at cards that fit the socket. They're inexpensive and easy to swap by the way, although access to them differs from laptop to laptop: in ones it's just unscrewing 1 screw and you're there and in others you have to remove the back plate (also easy), I haven't checked yours yet.

If older drivers don't work, and newest drivers won't work, we could also try drivers in-between and see what happens. It's a shot in the dark be from 2014 until now there ought to have been more releases, maybe one does the trick.

If you wish to try, show me the device IDs just in case, it's in the Device Manager as well:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/l3/nu1o0tssjxd3.png

FrankHz

Thanks for these suggestions. I'll keep them in mind (I've been inside a laptop before, so I'm not intimidated by that!).
Had so much difficulty with this last night, I decided to review Windows' Reliability Report. The most common feature of the 'critical events' each of the past 5 days has been the failure of Background Agent. These events show up in the Applications level reporting, so this process must be related to some app. It's among the items listed in the Startup tab of Task Manager that lists the Publisher as "Acer Incorporated", so this is from the laptop manufacturer. It will be a few days before I can do anything further with this.

aphanic

I think my reliability report is probably more colorful than yours with all the testing and tinkering I've been doing these past days haha:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/ou/kt5u8clvmhbc.png

If it serves you for anything, the only thing properly related to Acer that I have installed is the driver for the Airplane Mode device and Quick Access, nothing else. I found the rest to be unnecessary (and even then, Quick Access is just there to get me the status keys indicators, I don't really use the app).

FrankHz

Sorry for the delay in getting back to this. We were away for a camping trip in early August. The laptop was along; I had decided to see if there was any sensitivity to the hotspot/router being used (home vs campground). The laptop pretty much worked like a champ there when the wifi was available (generally had to walk to proximity of the central camp store to gain access).

In anticipation of that trip, I believe all I had specifically done was uninstall the Skype application and Microsoft's forced download of their new Edge browser (we use Chrome in our household), and remove vestiges of McAfee Antivirus in favor of Windows Defender. It seemed that these steps helped to avoid problems.

Since returning from that trip, the laptop wireless connectivity has been better, but not 100% reliable. It will still occasionally get into the Code 12, resource conflict state. When it happened this evening, rather than take any action, I decided to power the laptop down and do a cold restart. The wifi came back successfully upon full restart.

Below is the reliability chart for recent machine usage (since just before the camping trip!). I found it remarkable that even though Windows appeared to be working properly, other than the wireless adapter Code 12 fault, that when I did the full shutdown at 9:10 pm Windows still logged a "not properly shut down" event.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/2d/y49xcriiafpy.png

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