Dell wireless woes solved - bad DW 1390 WLAN card

I'll toss this out there for the net.knowledgebase:

Finally... a buddy of mine had been struggling with wireless
frustrations on a Dell laptop for about 7 months before bringing it to
me to look at. I spent 5 hours at his house last weekend struggling
like hell to make sense of what was going on. The symptoms were
intermittent and rather frustrating. We used 2 different access
points, 3 different laptops, one his Dell WinXP, one an HP running
winXP and my old iMac with an 802.11b card in it. Only my mac would
stay connected consistently. The other two with B/G cards either
wouldn't connect at all, could see networks, but not join, could
joint but not get ip addresses, or they were able to join and get ip
addresses, but surfing was laggy and inconsistent at best.

After a lot of A/B testing of every imaginiable component, updating
firmware, updating drivers, trying connections with various computers
turned off, I could come to no conclusion other than likely hardware
problems on one of the client machines. After getting things narrowed
down to his Dell laptop, and seeing wildly variable packet loss in
pings to the wireless router on his laptop alone, and verifying that
across 3 different access points was the smoking gun that led to me to
engage Dell support to go after the hardware problem.

I had to be extremely persistent and allow them remote control of the
machine to prove my point, but I did finally convince them to send us
a new wireless card based on the packet loss shown in pings to the
access point, and watching them get very frustrated trying to use
their remote access tool when they had me disconnect the laptop from
the wired network. They had me disassemble the hinge cover and remove
the keyboard to get to the card to reseat it. It made a slight
imprvovement in packet loss but the issue was still very much there.
They sent a new module next day air.

The problem module was a DW 1390 WLAN card REV A02. It is a broadcom
based wireless card.

The new module came today, popped it in and the difference was
immediate and glorious. :-)


Best Regards,
--
Todd H.
http://www.toddh.net/