Comparing Wireless Quality in Laptops
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Sitting at the same table working with @Dominica and I'm on an Apple MacBook and she is on a Lenovo Yoga 2. I can move anywhere at the table and my WiFi registers as full strength, no issues. No matter where she sits at the same table, she gets flickering, barely connecting and constantly dropping wireless. It's the first that I've really noted a dramatic difference in physical quality. I normally think of the Yoga as a pretty decent machine (physically) but this is one spot where the difference is dramatic. I'm able to work outside anywhere, she's barely able to use her machine anywhere.
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Have you updated the wireless driver. There was an update release to fix performance issues with the wireless card. You might try a driver direct from Intel as well. http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/products/laptops-and-netbooks/yoga-series/yoga-2-pro-lenovo/downloads/DS037481
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Lenovo didn't offer any drivers for this machine. They only had one that had a network shim it in to siphon off data. It's a non-Lenovo driver by necessity.
Yet another point against the Lenovo - it almost couldn't run Windows at all.
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While the drivers may not be complete - have you tried running Linux on the Yoga? Just to test the hardware? I will some times run a different OS from a thumb drive just for that reason... like when I'm building a Win OS system and don't have CDs to pull drivers from. I'll boot up my LinuxMint USB drive, pull the drivers from Dell and go from there.
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Very hard to get Linux on a thumb drive here. We are on a very slow connection out in the mountains.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Very hard to get Linux on a thumb drive here. We are on a very slow connection out in the mountains.
What would be required to gain additional signal while you are there? With the understanding it has to be small due to your relocation schedule.
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We have the ISP coming out this week to replace WiMAX equipment and put up a bigger antennae to increase the potential speed.
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@scottalanmiller said:
We have the ISP coming out this week to replace WiMAX equipment and put up a bigger antennae to increase the potential speed.
Awesome - I'll put the catalog down then... was gonna look to see what I could ship you.
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Rumour has it that we might see a 400% jump in speed.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Lenovo didn't offer any drivers for this machine. They only had one that had a network shim it in to siphon off data. It's a non-Lenovo driver by necessity.
Yet another point against the Lenovo - it almost couldn't run Windows at all.
I thought the siphon was from the fish software - now you're saying it was the NIC driver?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Rumour has it that we might see a 400% jump in speed.
Goes to show your pre-planning uploading 4HD Video worked out. I can't imagine trying to upload a 1GB video file with slow speeds AND being able to do other things with the blog and such.
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My Yoga Pro 2 had horrible WIFI access when I first got it in Dec 2013 before the Superfish issue.
The forums were loaded with complaints. I finally ordered a replacement Intel WIFI AC card, installed it and haven't had a single problem since.
It sounds like Lenovo is just installing crap WIFI cards, even though (I think) they are from Intel.
I can't speak for the Yoga 3, but the Yoga 1 and 2 were super easy to open and upgrade. Also going to AC offered me some future proofing too that was/is pretty nice!
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Lenovo didn't offer any drivers for this machine. They only had one that had a network shim it in to siphon off data. It's a non-Lenovo driver by necessity.
Yet another point against the Lenovo - it almost couldn't run Windows at all.
I thought the siphon was from the fish software - now you're saying it was the NIC driver?
That's where they put it. I reported on that last year. That's how they made sure that people could not work around it. They put the spyware right into the network drivers to ensure maximum penetration. That's why there was no fix.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Lenovo didn't offer any drivers for this machine. They only had one that had a network shim it in to siphon off data. It's a non-Lenovo driver by necessity.
Yet another point against the Lenovo - it almost couldn't run Windows at all.
I thought the siphon was from the fish software - now you're saying it was the NIC driver?
That's where they put it. I reported on that last year. That's how they made sure that people could not work around it. They put the spyware right into the network drivers to ensure maximum penetration. That's why there was no fix.
No fix? Even Lenovo is reporting you can 'restore your security' by uninstalling SuperFish... you're saying this is a lie?
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@Dashrender said:
No fix? Even Lenovo is reporting you can 'restore your security' by uninstalling SuperFish... you're saying this is a lie?
We had the issue and nothing called Superfish was installed. It was a clean install and the network siphon was there the moment you installed the wireless driver. This is all the stuff I reported last year. Lenovo lied for months and months about having hacked peoples' data, why would we even think of listening to them now? We already know that they are evil and dishonest. There is no reason we should think that they would tell the truth once caught.
Remember we are talking about someone caught in a foreign hacking scam that only admitted to it months after being caught. They dragged it out and tried to use the "big vendors can do no wrong" mentality that IT in America tends to have in the hopes that they could make it go away. They even pay huge money to another online community to partner with them and be their PR to make it seem reasonable that they didn't mean to do anything wrong (I pointed out that as long as they were partnered the community had no integrity just this week directly to the PR person for Lenovo.) Lenovo is throwing big money at making IT professions feel warm and fuzzy that they are fixing what was a breach of ethics beyond imagination and can never, ever be forgiven without losing all sense of reality.
When using the Yoga 2 last year, it was incredibly obvious with use that there was a shim in the network driver. A little fiddling with it and you could see the driver enacted the shim and without the driver, there was no shim (or wireless.) Going to Windows 10 TP was the only way to get (that we found) a non-altered driver that didn't have the shim.
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I found this thread http://mangolassi.it/topic/2761/new-lenovo-laptop-won-t-allow-posting-to-mango-lassi/33 where you are talking about the problem.
@scottalanmiller said:
Complete OS reinstall and the system is exactly the same afterwards. Something about the Lenovo-modified Windows 8.1 image is flaky and is causing very noticeable issues with posting or just basic web usage.
Might be anything. There is a lot of bloatware on there. But this feels like a network shim is in place hijacking traffic. It's just a guess but that is how it appears from the behavior.I take this to mean that you installed reinstalled the OS from the system restore partition and continued having the problem, which frankly I would fully expect.
Then some chatter about how the drivers on Lenovo's website don't work, then you mention that you are downloading a new ISO from MS directly, but you never give a status (in that thread) on the outcome of the original ISO install, instead there's a link to a post about how Lenovo is installing Superfish and
And the original suspicions were right. Lenovo put in a shim that was breaking connections so their own nefarious purposes.
Where am I missing the discussion stating that Lenovo released a driver with a shim in it?
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@Dashrender said:
I take this to mean that you installed reinstalled the OS from the system restore partition and continued having the problem, which frankly I would fully expect.
Clean install, the moment you installed their driver the shim was there.
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@scottalanmiller these drivers are still available for download after they said they fixed it??!?!
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller these drivers are still available for download after they said they fixed it??!?!
That I don't know nor do I want to attempt to find out, especially when we have very little equipment here to fall back on. We are running Windows 10 on there, which I don't believe they even support, because we couldn't get Windows 8.1 to work.
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@Dashrender said:
Where am I missing the discussion stating that Lenovo released a driver with a shim in it?
Must be missing in that thread. Dominica did a lot of testing without a lot of posting. I'm pretty sure, if memory serves, that the "broken drivers" on their site was the shim issue causing them to be broken. It's possible I'm wrong on that point. We did a lot of testing over a few days on that unit. The shim was obvious when it was there. I thought that we did a vanilla install but tried the broken drivers at one point and the shim was there. Perhaps there just weren't any drivers and we were never able to get a driver that didn't come from the restore partition.
