SOLVED: Realtek 8821AE WiFi adapter issues

[CookieMonster7]

Hello people,

 

First, a prelude:

As an unwitting owner of a laptop with the much maligned Realtek 8821AE WIFI chip, much like most of you I ran into certain issues.

Disconnects, hangs/slowdowns of the whole machine while apparently it's not doing much, inability to connect back to any 5Ghz network if I choose to manually select a network and God forbid click the 'Disconnect' button, etc., etc. I am Windows 10, updated with the latest driver from the manufacturer's website. No amount of clean installs or solutions online worked, aside from maybe using a very old driver which may or may not have performance issues too. Unfortunately, the new drivers have been uploaded to MS servers so Windows Update kindly gives them back to you.

 

Somewhere while looking online for this for the N-th time I stumbled on some linux forums stating they too have issues, one comment of which stood out to me - PCI bus and timing issues. *insert gears moving gif* There is a particular tool called MSI mode utility v3 (*LINK*, read the thread if you have the time, its interesting and you will context for what you are doing) which allows you to easily switch between INT and MSI interrupt modes for devices on PCI lanes. By default, drivers and hardware decide which to use - WIFI chips use MSI mode (newer, better), while some GPUs still use INT mode (older, currently somewhat simulated, more compatible). Lo and behold, no more issues! For good measure, I disabled the capability of the WiFi chip to sleep too, but that by itself had no effect earlier, so the real solution is INT mode. No more hangs, no more 5Ghz issues and I can switch networks in peace. 

 

TL;DR: I switched the 8821AE from MSI mode to INT mode using the tool from the link above and this SOLVED things for me! (pic included)

 

This is not a very small change and is reversible and is essentially a small registry tweak. It should not break your system. Still, you do this at your own risk.

Comment below with your results.