After several phone calls to the Best Buy Geek Squad, Acer technical support and Verizon Fios (my internet provider), no one could provide an answer to the issue I have been experiencing with my new Aspire R7. The Acer tech support finally decided that we should send the notebook in to have it checked out because they had no answer.
The problem I have been experiencing is an extremely weak WIFI signal on this notebook unless I am 3 to 5 feet away from the WIFI router. I currently have 50/25 service which usually gives me around 25mbps to 30mbps downloads through WIFI on other devices. At 15 feet, with a straight line of site to the router I may get 2.5mbps. If I move to the location in our home where the notebook is used most, (approximately 25 feet from the router) the speed drops to .7mbps to 1.3mbps. Those speeds make streaming almost impossible. The interesting part that no one could explain is that we have approximately 9 different WIFI devices which include notebooks, netbooks, a Mac Pro, IPAD, IPODS and several smart phones that have no connection issues at all. By the way these are not all operated at the same time. We did use several of these devices to test WIFI strength throughout the house. All of the devices except for the Acer tested no less than 23mbps in even the furthest point in the house. Those devices even work outside of our home. The last couple of days I have also been experiencing WIFI randomly disconnecting with the Acer. I don’t have this issue either with any other device.
A couple of other points of interest. I replaced the router thinking that it may have some compatibility issue. That made no difference. Also the first time I attempted an internet connection through WIFI, my Acer would not connect with a WAP2 connection. It wouldn’t recognize the password. I had to change the settings on the router to WAP. That was with the first router, the second router accepted WAP2. I was also told early on by the Acer tech line that there was an updated driver. I was later told that this was not true.
