Ralink RT3290 802.11bgn Wifi Card - Possible Issues [SOLVED]

[emanu883]

Dear Lucky owners of such a card,

At least from my experience I realized it is not that bad card, even if most probably many production pieces were faulty or not working properly, and many issues can be resolved.

Let me list in order of time the issues I faced and solved about this wifi card:

 0) First issue is not about RT3290 card itself but it is related to 802.11w encryption compatibility in between Windows8 and Cisco not allowing 802.11n speed rates so failing to G speeds only.

 - SOLUTIONS:

   a. As first test I would recommend trying another router from different brand to see if connecting at 802.11n speed rates

   b. If you prove point a issue, then try to fix the issue based on following post (in which you can see the reply from myself Emanuele on the 29th of Nov 2014):

  https://supportforums.cisco.com/document/113836/windows-8-clients-cant-associate-cisco-unified-wirel...

1) Signal strenght issue: original wifi card RT3290 installed on my HP laptop was having really bad antenna, with signal fluctuating and sometimes bad even really close to any Router I tried.

 - SOLUTION:

   Replace the RT3290 card even with same new card.

  (In my case as laptop was under warranty, I proved the issue via screenshots and they replaced with new card solving my signal strenght issue).

 2) Original issue (1) was actually resolved after HP replaced the wifi card with same model, but with the latest driver installed 5.0.45 seems like wifi rates change too frequently based on high sensitivity of the driver itself, so that suggested me issue was still there, so making me re-testing anything from scratch.

 - SOLUTION:

    Install 5.0.37 Driver - frequent rate changes issue (with driver 5.0.45) disappears and sensitivity of signal to rate changes seems to be a really good compromise to have good throughput.

 3) To check out 2nd issue above I started again using a third party software inSSIDer free version to check signal while I was doing speedtest on web.
 - RESOLUTION:
    inSSIDer normally works on Windows7 without any issue but on Windows8 (at least tested with RT3290) I have just discovered somehow this software was slowing down wifi card performance drastically showing a speed up to 0.1Mbps rather than 40Mbps.

   Simply closing the application issue was not recurring, so uninstalled it and after solving all the other issues above this card works perfectly (at least so far :p)

Hope this post will be informative and will help other about-to-get-mad guys as me 🙂

[nazrul28]

Hye.  After I read up your solutions, I am quite impressive and really want to try out those solutions. However, I am not very computer wise and I really appreciate if you make a video on solving this problem. Up to you if you want to upload it on the youtube (so that others with similar problem can view it and solve the problem too) or you want to direct email to me ( [Personal Information Removed] ). I really hope you can help me because I am stuck with this problem since last year. Thank you!!!