WLAN switch sporadically switching off

[willswitchengage]

Hello and happy Valentine's Day everyone...

VGN-AR51E

Laptop about four years old, roughly a year ago on - when using a specific public enterprise WLAN - the wireless switch light would randomly turn off after an hourish of use, prompting a restart to get it working again.

It has now begun doing this on my home WLAN also, with increasing frequency - I have had to restart four times already today. Other Internet fora have told me to try to switch off and on the "wireless device switch" manually from the system tray, but this just freezes my computer when I attempt this.

Any ideas? Is it repairable? My laptop is otherwise in ship-shape and it would be ridiculous to have to upgrade from a near £1000 machine due to such a petty fault, but there is consumerism for you.

Will

[Blencogo]

Hi Will,

Difficult to fix these sporadic problems.  There are a few things you could try: -

1. Reinstall the Wireless Switch Setting Utility (in the Preinstalled Utilities download).

2. Reinstall the Intel PRO Wireless WLAN Driver (in the Preinstalled Drivers Download - or you can look for a more recent update on the Intel Website)

3. Get an engineer to check the physical switch and the wireless card integrity.

You can download the Preinstalled Drivers and Utilities here: -

http://www.sony.co.uk/support/en/product/VGN-AR51E/updates

If all else fails, you can buy a Wireless Card and put it in your PCMCIA slot.  Something like these ones: -

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=wifi+pcmia+card&rh=i%...

Cheap and cheerful?

[flogger12345]

Hi Will. During that time, was there something install in this notebook?

Also check the Windows logs at Event Viewer, it's under Administrative tools and check out logs that will give us any ideas on whats causing this issue.

Message was edited by: flogger12345

Message was edited by: flogger12345

[willswitchengage]

Thanks for the replies, in the end I had thought of buying a wireless adapter or a really long cable.

Update: I have now noticed this problem exclusively occurs when I am streaming video, particularly high bandwitdh such as iPlayer, 4OD or SkyGo. Hmmm...