RTL8821CE constant wifi dropout

[Matt_Y]

I purchased this laptop last week and ever since have been having issues with wifi connectivity. The WLAN card (RTL8821CE) connects fine to my bt home hub (v5), however connectivity is very intermittent. I have run windows update, gone to HP website and upgraded driver to latest version (2023.66.1222.2017), but I still lose connectivity intermittently on a very regular basis.

I have my dell laptop sat next to the HP, both have full signal strength to bt router in same room no more than 2mtrs away from devices. I run a ping google.com -t on both devices, the dell stays connected, no dropped pings, response time stays consistently around 30ms. I have attached the same command output from the HP below, reponse times all over the place and regular dropped pings. 

I

I have disabled power saving on the network card, disabled IPV6, searched realtek website directly but can't find any later drivers to download. I have set laptop to high performance mode and tried both on battery and on mains power. I have also carried out the same test using my phone as mobile hotspot to eliminate the BT home hub and had exactly the same issue. Getting seriously tempted to take this device back to the shop and get a refund but apart from the network issues it's exactly what I'm after so would rather get it working if possible. I have also updated the BIOS, Chipset etc and all other drivers from HP website, whether network related or not, and have also done a recovery to native win 10 64 bit and repeated all of the above so that I don't have all the HP bloatware installed, still the same problem persists rendering this thing pretty much unusable.

[Matt_Y]

Just to add to the above, the laptop doesn't just lose connectivity to the internet, it drops the connection to my synology nas device in the same manner, so the issue seems to be on the wlan card / driver rather than anything router related to me.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

There is a newer driver than that you can try.   That would be the only suggestion I can offer.

2023.66.330.2018 Rev.A     Jun 26, 2018

https://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp88501-89000/sp88574.exe

[Matt_Y]

Thanks, sadly that has made no difference either. Out of interest, how did you find that driver as I had had a pretty good search and couldn't find anything newer than what I was running previously?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Sorry that driver didn't help.

I wonder if it is a design issue with the card or not, or if the antenna cable isn't securely fastened to the card.

That is an unusual card in as much as it is designed to run with only one antenna cable, and any other dual band N or AC card that I know of needs two antenna cables to work properly.

I found a newer driver by looking on the support pages for the latest HP notebooks that came out within the last couple of months.

[Chris_Tofu]

We have the exact same issue with several of these cards in HP ProBook laptops.  Any resolution on this?  We sent one back in for repair and it was returned saying there was no problem.

[Matt_Y]

Hi. I took the device back to pc world and luckily got a decent tech support guy that both understood the issue and didn't try and fob me off. They swapped it out for a new one, it's much better but still has the odd glitch. I find it doesn't like being connected via my Devolo WiFi extension kit but is generally fine when I switch them off and just rely on the bt home hub. 

[RSCollins]

Good Morning.

I have a HP Pavilion All-in-One - 24-r149 and I have an issue with the wireless like the above postings.

This happens all the time.  I just reset the computer to factory settings and it still happens.

Right now I have connected a network cable in order to get internet access.

When I finished my reset of the computer last night the problem still existed.  I then installed HP software to detect my computer and notify me of further updates.  It gave me three updates relating to network/wireless drivers which I installed.

I rebooted and wireless networks appeared.  Great but afterwards I decided to reboot and see if the issue was resolved.

On bootup no wireless network appeared.  

I have read online HP forums and this seems to be an issue with a lot of people.  Whatever has been suggested to try on these forums I tried but to no avail.

Is there a solution available?  I need to get this fixed.

Thanks

[Chris_Tofu · Accepted solution]

@RSCollins it sounds like yours might be a different issue, but if it does have the same wireless card (RTL8xxx), then perhaps this will help.  We have Windows 10 version 1803 installed and found that this new driver did the trick (which mentions that it now has support for v1803).

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/swdetails/hp-probook-450-g5-notebook-pc/17047142/mo...

[apurohit8]

Had the same issue on our new 14" x360 with the RTL8821CE chipset. Doing the ping test showed a regular, repeatable issue every 4-5 pings... so basically every 4-5 seconds. Mine was more consistent than MattY's here, but it also didn't drop completely - only showed aboout 3-seconds time for those "bad" pings. Very weird. I tried changing a few settings on the adapter, but it didn't fix it. So, I decided to replace the machine (from BestBuy, so today was the last day for the return... actually it's not, but that's a different story). Anyway, I started wiping the machine and removed a few pieces of software, and then suddenly the problem went away? I still returned the machine and am awaiting for a replacement, but am disappointed with this intermittent issue.

FYI, I also tried rolling back the driver (I had a newer one than what's listed here) and it didn't resolve the issue either.

I'll report back with the other machine, and now I know what to look for... so thanks for that, MattY!