Wireless worse in windows?

[sabre364]

On my mac book pro, when running vista in bootcamp, the wireless drops much more frequently. I have an old dell with xp that has no problems and when I run osx, it rarely if ever gets dropped.

Why could this be an issue? I've also noticed this in a basement at school, when I (and others) are in osx there are no problems, but when I boot camp to vista, I have a lot of difficulty maintaining a connection...I was told the wireless is fine when I took it in.

 

[Gav Mack]

It's worse firstly cos of Apple's rubbish driver and secondly you have to tweak Vista for it to work ok. If changing your power plan to from Balanced to high performance in control panel/power options improves things you'll have to tweak the advanced options of the balanced plan by amending any power settings related to wifi. If that still isn't enough go to Device Manager (right click My Computer, manage). Expand the network adapters, right click the wifi, properties and in the advanced tab go through the options turning any power management features off and set the transmit power to 100%.

Hopefully it will improve it enough for you, but with the 3 MBP's I've owned running bootcamp and far more I've worked on you'll need to get Windows 7 with it's generic broadcom N driver to get equal if not better performance than OSX.

 

[sabre364]

It's worse firstly cos of Apple's rubbish driver and secondly you have to tweak Vista for it to work ok. If changing your power plan to from Balanced to high performance in control panel/power options improves things you'll have to tweak the advanced options of the balanced plan by amending any power settings related to wifi. If that still isn't enough go to Device Manager (right click My Computer, manage). Expand the network adapters, right click the wifi, properties and in the advanced tab go through the options turning any power management features off and set the transmit power to 100%.

Hopefully it will improve it enough for you, but with the 3 MBP's I've owned running bootcamp and far more I've worked on you'll need to get Windows 7 with it's generic broadcom N driver to get equal if not better performance than OSX.

Thanks! I will most definitely try that out. Honestly, this is the best amount of advice I've ever gotten from anybody on this forum.

 

[sabre364]

This is still happening all the time, I bumped it up to high performance and then checked the settings on the wireless card/driver, they were at 100% already. I've had this problem before - dropping especially when the a/c comes on in the house, how weird is that. I used to have an old desktop that I built with xp. Sine I didn't have it in the same room as the cable modem, I had a wireless router and a wireless pci card in the desktop that came with the motherboard (asus). It used to do this all the time and I chalked it up to being a crappy card...because when I was at school the other 9 months of the year, it worked fine when on ethernet.

I then had a cheap inspiron notebook with vista that i switched back to xp and that never has a problem like this.

Now the MBP is having the same problem as that first desktop I built. I guess it could be just this house itself or the router but I doubt it since the inspiron never has this many issues and I've had wireless problems before when I've tried to run vista natively on this MBP. Not to mention I never have problems when in OSX.

 

[Gav Mack]

This is still happening all the time, I bumped it up to high performance and then checked the settings on the wireless card/driver, they were at 100% already. I've had this problem before - dropping especially when the a/c comes on in the house, how weird is that. I used to have an old desktop that I built with xp. Sine I didn't have it in the same room as the cable modem, I had a wireless router and a wireless pci card in the desktop that came with the motherboard (asus). It used to do this all the time and I chalked it up to being a crappy card...because when I was at school the other 9 months of the year, it worked fine when on ethernet.

I then had a cheap inspiron notebook with vista that i switched back to xp and that never has a problem like this.

Now the MBP is having the same problem as that first desktop I built. I guess it could be just this house itself or the router but I doubt it since the inspiron never has this many issues and I've had wireless problems before when I've tried to run vista natively on this MBP. Not to mention I never have problems when in OSX.

Could be the router - check for newer firmware and update via cable if necessary. If that still doesn't work go into it's advanced wireless settings and change the wireless preamble. Most are set at 100 - try 50. I had similar issues with a MBP before and more recently a common issue with Ubuntu systems.

EDIT: Or try getting the broadcom N driver from Microsoft Update Catalog;

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/629209/

Works like a peach on W7 and I believe it's Vista compatible.. You may have to upgrade the driver manually via Device Manager selecting it's download location.

 

[LtRammstein]

Good idea to update the driver, but Windows 7 causes that driver to "lag" periodically. A friend of mine send me a thread on an overclocking website, and the software the thread poster suggested looks promising. It's called, "Vista Anti-Lag." You have to remember, Windows 7 IS Vista. So this should work no problem. I haven't tried it yet, but I will soon.

http://vista-anti-lag.software.informer.com/

 

[Gav Mack]

Good idea to update the driver, but Windows 7 causes that driver to "lag" periodically. A friend of mine send me a thread on an overclocking website, and the software the thread poster suggested looks promising. It's called, "Vista Anti-Lag." You have to remember, Windows 7 IS Vista. So this should work no problem. I haven't tried it yet, but I will soon.

http://vista-anti-lag.software.informer.com/

With only 100 downloads I wouldn't mind a link to that forum post you mentioned to see what it actually does. I use gigabit mostly at home so I havent picked up this issue on 7 but have you tried using Process Explorer/Monitor to see what's causing it?

In my case I've only got two weeks for a fresh install of 7 RTM from Technet with newer SL Beta drivers - tweaking is on hold for a while!

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I'm having this same problem myself, on a Boot Camp Vista Ultimate install on a C2D iMac. Using wireless to connect, the signal strength is much worse in Windows, for some reason.

Mac OS X is showing 4/4 signal bars, whereas Windows shows 2/5. Both installs connect to the Internet just fine though.