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So I have a second hand notebook. The previous owner seems solid and says that for him, he was able to catch his Wifi router without any issues, even when he was in front of his house and the router was in 3rd floor inside...

Now I am the owner and the laptop was in service once. I used wired lan before so I did not care, but now I tried the wifi adapter and it is almost useless. I have wifi router RIGHT next to it and it indicates only 3 bars out of 5. Any other wifi routers in the house are inaccessible.

I was looking into the computer and wifi antenna is connected. I even tried to switch the main and aux antennas and it did not help at all. When I disconnect antennas and just leave the adapter without them, I get 2 bars out of 5 in the same experiment as before.

I even took the whole computer apart (inc. display) and the antennas do not appear to be damaged or severed anywhere... This is a little mystery to me. What else can I try?

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  • If possible, try to borrow someone else's laptop, and see if it has the same issue. If it does, maybe it's the router. If you can't borrow another laptop, see if one of your friends will let you go on their router at their place. If it works fine there, then your router is probably not working properly.
    – RobH
    Commented Aug 28, 2014 at 0:03
  • Router is fine, I can connect to it with my second notebook and even my phone. Actually, I can connect to the router with my silly old phone even when I'm not in the same floor...
    – Paya
    Commented Aug 28, 2014 at 0:06

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The Three (3) Wall Rule and Wireless Penetration

Background

Please note ISM band wireless technology (2.4 and 5.8 GHz) has physical limitations when it comes to penetration through walls.

I have even seen experienced engineers stuff this up. This is very bad for business. People see wireless as this invisible medium and sometimes associate it with magic. It’s not magic and has limitations which should clearly be spelt out so that clients’ expectations are matched.

Scenarios

No wall. This is called line of sight. Wireless requires line of sight due to the physics of the medium. Radio waves do not penetrate walls but if there are no walls they propagate nicely. If there are no walls you will have Great Service.

One wall. There will be Normal Service, and it will work fine.

Two walls.There will be service, and it should be okay. It’s called Okay Service.

Three walls. Service will vary between just working to terrible. It’s called Poor / Terrible Service.

Four walls and more. Even though you might see a signal, you will have absolutely horrendous service. Do not go there as you will destroy the client’s expectations and they will continuously log support calls to sort something out that we can’t.

If you know these basics you can do almost any site survey, and you can even encourage clients to do their own site survey for quantity and position of Access Points. Please note however that there is a difference between a window, a concrete slab, and a normal wall. If you are unsure please leave this up to an expert.

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    This was flagged for unattributed copying, since the content was scraped from your other answer by one of those dodgy content farms, confusing the heck out of me. Apologies for this specific case - though my comment on the other answer is still true. As a dupe, its a better idea to VTC or flag as a dupe, rather than to post the same answer again.
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Commented Aug 28, 2014 at 8:01

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