Laptop constantly drops Wi-fi

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad W520 Windows 10, and it constantly drops Wi-fi. The signal goes out, I lose work, then the wi-fi symbol goes out. It usually takes about 60-120 seconds before the wi-fi comes back and the page loads again and I can continue working. I figured it was my old router/modem being old so I replaced them. Now, instead of having to manually turn the Wi-fi off and on, it will reset itself automatically, but it still does it about every 15 minutes. It's very annoying and is slowing down my productivity.

I looked up a few things on-line and this seems to be a common problem with machines that have Window 7,8, and 10, and there seems to be a few different options, but there doesn't seem to be anything that consistently works for everyone. The only thing I've tried so far is turning off the option to save power in the network configuration.

I thought I'd turn to the experts on here for help. I'd prefer to set this laptop on fire, but I can't afford a new one at the moment and wouldn't know what to buy anyway. Any help to tide me over? Other than this one issue, I have little problems with my current machine.

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Originally Posted by Irving

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad W520 Windows 7, and it constantly drops Wi-fi. The signal goes out, I lose work, then the wi-fi symbol goes out. It usually takes about 60-120 seconds before the wi-fi comes back and the page loads again and I can continue working. I figured it was my old router/modem being old so I replaced them. Now, instead of having to manually turn the Wi-fi off and on, it will reset itself automatically, but it still does it about every 15 minutes. It's very annoying and is slowing down my productivity.

I looked up a few things on-line and this seems to be a common problem with machines that have Window 7,8, and 10, and there seems to be a few different options, but there doesn't seem to be anything that consistently works for everyone. The only thing I've tried so far is turning off the option to save power in the network configuration.

I thought I'd turn to the experts on here for help. I'd prefer to set this laptop on fire, but I can't afford a new one at the moment and wouldn't know what to buy anyway. Any help to tide me over? Other than this one issue, I have little problems with my current machine.

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Does it drop wi-fi everywhere or just at your home? Did you upgrade your router with a personally bought router or did you have your internet provider upgrade the router?


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Originally Posted by BigDee

Does it drop wi-fi everywhere or just at your home? Did you upgrade your router with a personally bought router or did you have your internet provider upgrade the router?


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Also, have you checked to make sure your running the most current drivers for whatever wifi device is installed on your laptop?


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Sounds like the kind of problems I used to have with Century Link.

Also, I’ll have to look it up but there’s an app that lets you see a graphical representation of all of the WiFi signals where you are. There were about twenty of them in my home and a large portion of them kind of overlap each other. Made some setting adjustments in my router and now I’m not competing with everyone else’s signal and my internet works great.

Not sure if any of that helps you. I’ll try and find the name of that app. Might be after Christmas though.

Also uninstall IBM Access connections - or whatever WAN/LAN switching software may be installed. Garbage.

If you need to easily switch network connectivity, I recommend Net Profiles Mod. For those that know what I'm talking about, it's also the only one that will work with VMNICS. It also works with Virtual Box.

Did you check wireless encryptions?
When my HPQ laptop went to crap, I took over my mom's old window 7 Dell laptop as a backup. It was having serious internet issue. It will work for 30 second,and not work work another 30-45 second of down/upload. I try to get into win7 and re do entire thing. Read lots of troubleshooting online and change the setting on laptop and wireless router etc.
After all that troubleshoot, I tried the encryption side. I changed it from AES to TKIP , and it works well. [facepalm]

Try changing to another channel on your router. I had issues with channel congestion from the neighbors, my machine would drop wifi, then search for and reconnect to my network. The problem went away when I moved from the default channel.

Experienced this when I first downgraded to 8 from 7. Will see if I can find the batch file I made to force the process to work. Was netsh wlan something or other as the main feature in the shindig. Oddly, it stopped doing it on its own and even more oddly, I was able to have no issues with a bridged VM on the same otherwise crappy WiFi connection.

It's not a network issue, because when my laptop goes out, everything else on my network is fine, so I know it's specifically the laptop. Also, when I looked it up, many other people were having the same issue, across multiple brands of laptops.

One of the three "fixes" I've found was to install the latest drivers (which makes sense since this hasn't always been the case). I haven't done that yet. I wanted to run it by everyone here since there are a lot of networking people and if it is a known issue, I thought I'd be able to cut out some trial and error. Thanks everyone so far.

I would check the power settings to ensure that it is not turning off wifi after a period of time. A quick google can show you where to find that for your particular OS. Typically, if not in the general power/sleep settings, it can be found as one of the settings for the wireless driver.

Changing the wifi channel on the router, as mentioned above, is also great advice, as is uninstalling vendor provided wifi "helper" programs. All you really need is the driver.

It could also be a heat related problem. Wifi cards are usually located in a part of the laptop that dosent get the best airflow. They are cheap on ebay and relatively easy to replace. If your signal strength is low perhaps the 2 or 3 connections to the card are flakey. Youtube a vid on how to check or replace the card.

At least it's not blue screening. Wifi cards love to do that when they mess up.

Merry Christmas!