dual band capable wireless card not detecting 5ghz in win10?

[gameboy3800]

so heres the story: i got an old dell m6500 laptop with a first gen i7 that i've been trying to upgrade the wifi in for the past month or so with little success. it came with a very basic 2.4ghz chip. i've had these machines before and know for a fact that these machines are capable of connecting to dual band/5ghz connections. in fact i have plenty other far older machines with even a pentium 4 that can see my 5ghz network, and they have been able to see the network for years.

 

whenever i needed to connect to the 5ghz network on this machine, i have a comically large netgear wireless adapter usb thing that works well enough for downloading games and such. but its annoying.

 

so i get myself an intel 7260an dual band chip, install it all fine with no issues. its one of the best wifi chips that will fit the old msata based connector of this machine, but i can still only connect to 2.4ghz wifi connections. i look in device manager and it for sure says that it's able to see wireless a/b/g/n. i change preferred network to 5.2ghz, but still i can only see 2.4ghz.

 

oh well, maybe this computer is just too old for wireless ac. no big deal. so now i get a period correct intel centrino ultimate 6300 card, the best wifi card that this computer could come with from the factory. there's even a dedicated driver for it on the dell m6500 support page. awesome! i'll finally have 5ghz on the laptop without needing a usb thing!

 

except no, i can still only see 2.4ghz in the detected wifi networks. running the netsh wlan show drivers command in cmd shows that it can in fact see 802.11a/b/g/n, it's just that windows 10 on this machine refuses to see my network despite literally everything else i own being able to see it and connect to it perfectly fine.

 

i have tried performing a network reset in windows, but even after restarting with fresh network drivers, i can still only see 2.4ghz.

 

worse now, not even my large netgear AC usb card will see 5ghz anymore! something is broken within windows.

 

i'm willing to bet the intel 7260 card i got before would work perfectly fine if windows wasnt just trash.

 

so, is there something i can do to the registry or something to allow the computer to see 5ghz when i absolutely do have a 5ghz capable network and 5ghz capable wireless card?

[Alex Atkin UK]

Just now, gameboy3800 said:

so, is there something i can do to the registry or something to allow the computer to see 5ghz when i absolutely do have a 5ghz capable network and 5ghz capable wireless card?

This is almost always a driver issue, though the USB adapter having trouble too makes me wonder.

 

Generally speaking I will avoid laptop vendor drivers and get them directly, especially Intel where they are on their website.

[gameboy3800]

1 minute ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

This is almost always a driver issue, though the USB adapter having trouble too makes me wonder.

 

Generally speaking I will avoid laptop vendor drivers and get them directly, especially Intel where they are on their website.

currently it is running the automatically found drivers that windows put on when i restarted after a network reset, still only seeing 2.4ghz.

[gameboy3800]

10 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

This is almost always a driver issue, though the USB adapter having trouble too makes me wonder.

 

Generally speaking I will avoid laptop vendor drivers and get them directly, especially Intel where they are on their website.

the intel website says that there is no downloads available for the centrino 6300.
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/59474/intel-centrino-ultimate-n-6300-dual-band

[Alex Atkin UK]

38 minutes ago, gameboy3800 said:

currently it is running the automatically found drivers that windows put on when i restarted after a network reset, still only seeing 2.4ghz.

I've had this exact problem when Windows pulled the drivers from Windows Update vs manually installing them, though I don't think ever with Intel.

 

30 minutes ago, gameboy3800 said:

the intel website says that there is no downloads available for the centrino 6300.
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/59474/intel-centrino-ultimate-n-6300-dual-band

How extremely annoying.

 

Have you tried the 7260 to see if THAT has drivers on their site?  You're right in that if it was detected, it should have worked and I see from Google other people upgrading older Dell laptops with that card fine.

[gameboy3800]

7 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I've had this exact problem when Windows pulled the drivers from Windows Update vs manually installing them, though I don't think ever with Intel.

 

How extremely annoying.

 

Have you tried the 7260 to see if THAT has drivers on their site?  You're right in that if it was detected, it should have worked and I see from Google other people upgrading older Dell laptops with that card fine.

i tried installing the intel drivers on the 7260 after it wouldnt detect 5ghz, only to see the same result. it was about at that time the usb netgear stopped seeing 5ghz as well. 

 

then i got the centrino and here we are today with nothing seeing 5ghz on this laptop. i just checked the bios to see if any of those settings would cause it to not detect wifi bands, but theres nothing.

[Zioid]

Check router if 5g bands use wpa3 encryption. ive seen that issue before.

Or its using wpa2/3 this can cause problems for «older devices

[gameboy3800]

Just now, Zioid said:

Check router if 5g bands use wpa3 encryption. ive seen that issue before.

Or its using wpa2/3 this can cause problems for «older devices

it uses wpa/wpa2. it obviously works as even my toshiba p25 with a pentium 4 can connect to my 5ghz network.

[Guest]

I don't quite see what the issue is here? You mentioned using the N6300 and not getting 5Ghz wireless yet the screenshot shows 5Ghz wireless? 802.11A & N are both 5Ghz. The card is only capable of A,G & N.

 

Edit: just re-read and realised what you mean. Is the SSID broadcast combined or separate? 

[Alex Atkin UK]

3 hours ago, Windspeed36 said:

I don't quite see what the issue is here? You mentioned using the N6300 and not getting 5Ghz wireless yet the screenshot shows 5Ghz wireless? 802.11A & N are both 5Ghz. The card is only capable of A,G & N.

 

Edit: just re-read and realised what you mean. Is the SSID broadcast combined or separate? 

I took that as obvious seeing as they said on one PC they can "see their 5Ghz network" and they "used to be able to see it via USB adapter".

[gameboy3800]

 

On 2/17/2021 at 9:19 PM, Alex Atkin UK said:

I took that as obvious seeing as they said on one PC they can "see their 5Ghz network" and they "used to be able to see it via USB adapter".

so get this: today we had a power outtage right; this laptop has terrible battery life and lost power after a few minutes or so bc i forgot it was still on. the network also shut down obviously. when the power comes back on and i get back on this laptop, i can now magically see and connect to 5ghz on it. i am not sure if i just needed to fully drain the laptop of power or if effectively fully resetting the network was the answer.my best guess it that windows10 is just trash and it was a random glitch.

[Falcon1986]

15 hours ago, gameboy3800 said:

so get this: today we had a power outtage right; this laptop has terrible battery life and lost power after a few minutes or so bc i forgot it was still on. the network also shut down obviously. when the power comes back on and i get back on this laptop, i can now magically see and connect to 5ghz on it. i am not sure if i just needed to fully drain the laptop of power or if effectively fully resetting the network was the answer.my best guess it that windows10 is just trash and it was a random glitch.

Check the wireless settings that the wireless router/gateway chose to utilize. You can run a wireless survey using WiFi Analyzer to see exactly, especially if things are set to ‘auto’ on the router side.

 

WiFi 4 or older clients can sometimes have issues with WiFi 5/6-compatible access points even if the client has a 5GHz antenna. Some routers/gateways will try to “intelligently” apply settings after a power-cycle and wireless scan. If you’re lucky, it will utilize a channel and bandwidth that is more compatible with older devices while at other times it will favour newer devices. In the latter case, your older devices will lose connectivity because they can’t “see” the access point.

 

Many wireless routers these days have a “legacy” support mode (you’ll see it on Asus routers) which means it will dynamically change the channel width between 20/40/80/etc. MHz, allow lower rates to support old 802.11b/g devices, and avoid DFS channels for the sake of compatibility. The upside to this mode is that your older (WiFi 4 and prior) clients will be able to access the network, but the downside is that these settings are to the detriment of your newer clients which cannot achieve higher speeds.

 

That’s the cost of using legacy hardware in modern networks. If you’re interested in avoiding this altogether, you can use a physically different AP for legacy clients and another for more newer clients.

Edited February 19, 2021 by Falcon1986
Incorrect statement

[Alex Atkin UK]

6 hours ago, Falcon1986 said:

Many wireless routers these days have a “legacy” support mode (you’ll see it on Asus routers) which means it will dynamically change the channel width between 20/40/80/etc. MHz

I do not believe legacy mode has anything to do with this, even on WiFi 5/6 it HAS to support smaller channel widths as while your laptop might support 160Mhz, phones usually are limited to 80Mhz.

Legacy mode is about the slower speeds and older WiFi protocol support rather than the channel width.

[Falcon1986]

1 minute ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I do not believe legacy mode has anything to do with this, even on WiFi 5/6 it HAS to support smaller channel widths as while your laptop might support 160Mhz, phones usually are limited to 80Mhz.

Legacy mode is about the slower speeds and older WiFi protocol support rather than the channel width.

Sorry, you are correct. I believe I edited that line and made the whole statement confusing without realizing it.

[Alex Atkin UK]

4 hours ago, Falcon1986 said:

Sorry, you are correct. I believe I edited that line and made the whole statement confusing without realizing it.

I'm an expert at doing that.

[Xavier Yvonne Zanzibari0]

On 2/20/2021 at 3:37 AM, Alex Atkin UK said:

I'm an expert at doing that.

obfuscating oneself to the point where you start a sentence to express your agreement to the original poster's statement that started the whole thread and by the end of this same sentence you realize it's the size of a whale.

That sentence should actually be taken outside and shot in the back of the head. It's not even a complete sentence... notice it didn't even start with proper Capitalization! Man! Punctuation is ok though. But in a feeble attempt as a noob to go back on the topic of this thread:
Is the dual band capable wireless card now properly detecting its 5Ghz band properly in win10.

I cannot confirm this myself, I have an HP without WiFi. My win10 vm simulates WiFi over eth0 in linux. So the windows 10 vm thinks it has a bleeding edge 5G modem it can chat to for dhcp chitchat and stuff about tweets and whatnot. While it's actually just a 1 meter of CAT7 cable running to the glass-fiber modem.