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peach freak
Junior Member

Posts: 141
Registered: 10-05

My laptop has a 2.4 GHZ Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, and an Intel GMA4500 video card. So it should be more than enough to run anything from Doom.

Except that there's some weird correlation between me playing Doom and me losing my wireless internet connection. This happens with any source port, whether it be Doomsday, ZDoom, etc. I will go in, heck, even for a few minutes, and when I quit the game, I see that there's a Red X on my wireless icon, telling me that there are no wireless connections available. I have to restart my computer for the wireless to be re-enabled.

Sometimes I have serious performance slowdowns, even in the smallest Doom levels during this time.

I've done the usual, Malwarebytes scan, virus scan, reinstall any related drivers (video, wireless).

Could heat have any problem with this?

02-07-12 17:00 #

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Maes
I like big butts!

Posts: 8662
Registered: 07-06

Windows 7 and Vista are known to be finicky with Intel wireless adapters like the one you probably have, and do not "hold" a wireless connection well, especially with WPA encryption.

02-07-12 17:06 #

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peach freak
Junior Member

Posts: 141
Registered: 10-05

Heh, should've specified my laptop too. It's a Dell Latitude E5400, and the wireless adapter I have is the Dell Wireless 1510 Wireless-N WLAN Mini Card.

And yes, I do use WPA encryption at home.

02-07-12 17:12 #

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Quasar
Moderator

Posts: 4615
Registered: 08-00

Haven't had great experiences with Dell's wireless adapters so far. They're very particular about the WAPs they'll connect to, and fail to connect for mysterious reasons.

02-08-12 02:09 #

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K!r4
Senior Member

Posts: 1210
Registered: 05-07

Have you tried other games?

02-08-12 03:07 #

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Maes
I like big butts!

Posts: 8662
Registered: 07-06

Quasar said:
Haven't had great experiences with Dell's wireless adapters so far. They're very particular about the WAPs they'll connect to, and fail to connect for mysterious reasons.

This has actually been proven time and again to be attributable to the NEW and ENHANCED!! handling of WPA connections starting with Windows Vista and afterwards. The only "fix" for it was to upgrade not the drivers or the wireless adapter, but the wireless routers themselves. The technical details are too complex to repeat here in their their entirety, but the root cause had something to do with M$ changing the timeout values of certain WPA protocols. Older routers with strict WPA compliance just won't have any of that. More modern ones (made after 2007) can usually handle this laxness, as well as some older ones after a firmware upgrade, but not always.

If you have an older router that cannot be upgraded, then all you can do is a) Using no encryption or WEP (unacceptable) b) Using another OS. XP and Linux don't have those issues when using the same adapters and the same routers, so I can't tolerate anyone blaming it on the hardware alone. It's a matter of a broken OS forcing manufacturers to hack around the standards in order to give the illusion of "NEW and ENHANCED!!!" compatibility.

To go back to the OP, try installing another OS alongside 7/Vista and see if the connection ever breaks down. I completely uninstalled Vista from my Dell Inspiron 1720 after I saw that it could not be relied upon to hold any WPA connection with the routers I was using, and which I could not change at a whim. Dual-booting XP with Ubuntu, enjoying rock-steady WPA connections wherever I brought the laptop, and never looked back (or forward?).

02-08-12 08:45 #

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Mr. Chris
The term is "prehensile"

Posts: 3663
Registered: 07-02

Is this with WPA or WPA2 encryption?

02-08-12 17:26 #

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peach freak
Junior Member

Posts: 141
Registered: 10-05

Here's my router information:

Router model: WRT54G2
Firmware: 1.0.04
Wireless security: WPA personal

I believe I also got my wireless connection to crap out while playing on an SNES emulator.

02-09-12 00:15 #

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EvisceratoR
Member

Posts: 263
Registered: 01-02

It seems your router is 2 versions behind. You have 1.0 and the newest is 1.5. Check here for instructions on how to upgrade:

http://homesupport.cisco.com/en-us/wireless/lbc/WRT54G2

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02-21-12 10:19 #

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Maes
I like big butts!

Posts: 8662
Registered: 07-06

Well, he'll be lucky if he can still upgrade it. I was stuck with a router whose non-RoHS versions got stuck in versions of the firmware that were not compatible with Vista/7, while the newest RoHS versions had no problems.

I still haven't found a satisfactory technical explanation of how/why M$ took such a massive shit on established industry standards like WPA by bending the rules to their own pettiness, and pretty much forcing router manufacturers to either "sink or swim". And no, "getting on with the times" does not cut it, since Linux/XP/Android etc. have no problems connecting with the very same routers. The closest I found to an explanation is that there was something wrong with how Vista/7 handles WPA key regroup timeouts, and most router makers added patches to accommodate this brokenness, making it a de-facto "standard", instead of M$ properly fixing their wireless protocols.

02-21-12 10:46 #

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peach freak
Junior Member

Posts: 141
Registered: 10-05

Would I be able to upgrade it to 1.5? I upgraded the firmware a while back, and that's where the version is at today. I don't know if I can upgrade to 1.5, because the version number of my router says 1.0 on the bottom of the router.

Maybe there were later editions of this router released?

02-21-12 21:33 #

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peach freak
Junior Member

Posts: 141
Registered: 10-05

I was just running around in ZDoom with full screen turned off, so I saw the taskbar at the bottom, and the connection did drop. The wirless icon went from the white bars icon (signal strength), to an orange asterisk (available networks, mine not found however), to a Red X (nothing found).

The loss of my internet connection when playing Doom always seems to be preceded by a severe performance drop, even if I'm in the tiniest of maps.

I know I got this router in mid-2008. Is that old enough for it to be causing problems?

03-10-12 22:53 #

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Gez
Why don't I have a custom title by now?!

Posts: 7042
Registered: 07-07

Are you running some power saving mode or something? It's possible that to offset the increased CPU consumption, the wifi antenna gets less power or something.

03-10-12 23:04 #

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Doomworld Forums > Classic Doom > Doom General > My laptop doesn't like Doom

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