I started having issues with loss of connectivity with my Intel AC7260 card thats in my N73JQ laptop. I installed this card 2-3 years ago, because the stock card in this laptop was only 2.4GHz. It has worked flawlessly until I upgraded to Windows 10 a few months ago. Since the upgrade, I've had intermittent issues with loss of connectivity. When the loss of connectivity occurs, no SSIDs show up at all and the connection mode is switched to "Manual". There's no way to manually turn the radio back on. It seems the radio switch on the side of the case sometimes triggers this issue, and I accidentally hit that switch from time to time (it's happened without hitting the switch too). I only recently discovered that uninstalling the device in Device Manager then rebooting will get it going again, which leads me to believe this is not hardware related. I know the last...several Windows 10 builds have been known to produce issues with network cards. I was wondering if there was any way to determine if this issue is due to Windows 10, a software conflict, or is in fact hardware related.
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Issues with Intel AC7260 NIC in laptop
- Thread starter fatryan
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ThreeDee
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have you gone to Intel's website and grabbed their latest drivers for your card? .. grab chipset drivers too and see if all that helps.
I did try that already, yes. I did it right when I installed Windows 10 actually...which was only a couple months ago. I don't remember the date of the driver, but the network card is a fairly old card. My laptop is ancient, but the network card isn't exactly new either. It was already old when I bought it 2-3 years ago.
After making this thread, I tried removing the device in Device Manager again, and so far it has continued to work. Though with that said, I rarely use this laptop as my workstation. The desktop in my sig is my main workstation, while the laptop gets relegated to 3rd monitor duty using Space Desk. I posted this thread on a day when I had to work from home at my rental property while a contractor was working in the basement, so I needed to use the laptop alone. I needed the network card to work that day or else I had to hardwire to the router across the room. Fortunately the device uninstall worked and continued to work all day.
Not sure what you mean by chipset drivers...are you talking about for the motherboard? If so, Asus pretty much stopped development in 2010. It's a consumer grade laptop with some amount of upgradability, but the board is all proprietary Asus. I did update to the latest drivers/firmware from Asus's site, but I recall it was extremely out of date.
FWIW, I completely tore the laptop apart about 2 months ago, thinking maybe there was some toasted sections of the board or some popped caps or something. I found nothing visibly wrong with the internal components. I tried my best to clean everything, but of course that did nothing to help the wireless network card issue. The fact that these issues began the second I installed Windows 10 makes me think it must be OS/driver related.
ThreeDee
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Intel® HM55 Express Chipset .. as old as it is, Win10 probably has as updated as it's gonna get .. but you can go to Intel's site and just grab their driver update utility and run it and see what happens.. it there is an update for your stuff, it will give you the option to install the more up to date drivers.
..and if you haven't already, maybe updating the BIOS to it's latest version will help
https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/N73JQ/N73JQAS209.zip
..and if you haven't already, maybe updating the BIOS to it's latest version will help
https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/N73JQ/N73JQAS209.zip
Yeah I use the Intel driver update utility on both my desktop and laptop. So unless that driver is like brand new, i either already have it or am ineligible to download it for some reason. I'll have to check tomorrow to see what's currently installed.
Pretty sure i also updated the BIOS but I'll check that too.
So I just checked the driver versions. The wireless card is on Microsoft driver 17.15.0.5, which according to the Intel driver update utility is the driver to use. Or at least its not saying I need to update it...
I looked up that Intel HM55 chipset driver, but I'm not sure that's supposed to be used on my hardware. Intel lists it as a desktop driver, not a mobile driver. It also is for Intel 5 series, which I'm assuming relates to the Intel CPU series. Is that correct? If so, then I would need a 7 series chipset driver because this thing has an i7-Q740 CPU. Also worth noting is that Intel states that driver only supports USB 2.0, but I have a 3.0 port so I obviously require support for it.
The BIOS is on v.205, which is the first revision from the original firmware and currently 3 versions old. I tried to update to 209, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to do that. There's no update option in the BIOS itself. I placed both the .ZIP and .209 files on a freshly-formatted USB drive and tried booting to that, no dice. Didn't do anything. Not sure if any of this matters or not for a laptop this old, but I was using a USB 3.0 drive thats 64GB and formatted to exFAT. My laptop has a USB 3.0 port and the USB device was recognized by the BIOS as a boot device. I have a USB 2.0 64GB drive and a really old USB 2.0 (or maybe older?) 1GB drive circa 2003 lol. I could try either of those and/or try formatting to NTFS instead of exFAT.
EDIT: I figured out how to update the BIOS. I just somehow completely missed the "Easy Flash" menu option. So I'm on v.209 now, which is the latest. Still no suggested driver updates from Intel. I guess time will tell if the BIOS update made any difference for this wireless card issue.
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