[gspears]

I've been working network issues for the last couple of days. I've determined that the 1510 in the 10v with a 270 processor and Win7’s latest driver will connect with my N router at 270 Meg reliably. If I bump the router down to G speed, it connects at 130, again reliably. The 10v I just received with the 280 processor had a 1397 card and it worked well. But then I changed it out for a 1510 and it had all kinds of issues. After a lot of card swapping, OS swapping, HD swapping, and router setup, I've determined the following:

The 10v 270 has no issues running at G or N speeds when set to WPA2 with AES (and the router set the same of course.) It really has no networking issues at all except it sometimes is a little hard to get back online after a reboot. All these tests were with Win 7 RC1 running the latest Win7 driver for the 10v downloaded using Windows Update.

The 10v 280 on the other hand, with win 7 and the latest driver will not connect in N mode. It will connect in G mode at 130 but in N mode it would sometimes connect, but the speeds would be terribly slow, like less than 10 Meg. I would have to slow the router down to G mode to get it to connect reliably. In G mode it would connect very reliably (except for the hard to reconnect after reboot issue, but this issue was rare) at 130 and work all day with no issues. But as soon as I bump the router back up to N speed, it would fail.

Some observations:

When you initially load Win7, the driver it loads for the 1510 doesn't work very well and causes slow connections, about half speed. After doing updates and letting Win7 load the latest 1510 driver, the speeds come up and the 1510 runs correctly (on the 270).

With XP on the 280 the 1510 never achieves N speed. It does run reliably at 130 no matter how the router is set. It seems to ignore the change when you tell the router to run at N speeds, where as with Win7 when you set the router to N speeds the 270 bumps it's speed up to 270 meg and ticks happly along. On the other hand the 280 just craps out and can't connect or connects for a short time but can't do anything and eventually craps out.

I wonder if the 280 running the faster buss speed causes the 1510 to fail. In other words the 1510 can't run at the faster buss speed. So dell finds this to be true and rigs XP to only run the 1510 in G mode on the 280?

So my question is, does anybody have the 1510 running at N speeds in a 280 equipped machine?

I hope this has been helpful and thanks in advance for any info.

[gspears]

Well I called Dell about this issue as well as posted this post on their forums (where it was quickly deleted for offensive language? What offensive language?) and of course they were no help. After bouncing through 4 people I finally got to the "network" department where they said they had not heard of the problem but also couldn't tell me if any 10vs with a 280 were running in N mode. It seems to me that they must have sold a ton of these with the 280 and the 1510 so it seems that somebody must have it working or there must be a ton of mad people.

Anyway, they said they would escalate the problem and check into it. I'm not sure what that means I guess we'll see.

I still have not heard from anybody that has the 280 with a 1510 running at N speeds. Anybody?

[kommissar]

even in the short time i've been on the board, i've read anecdotal reports of N280/1510 being unreliable. so much so, that i opted for N270/1397, figuring the payoff wasn't sufficient to warrant the hassle. i actually ended up with 10v base model.

now that it's gotten through the infant mortality phase, i intend to upgrade to 2g ram, runcore 32g, and install osx.

you did a really good job quanitifying the issues, though. i doubt dell was as thorough, which is probably why you can't get a straight answer.

[gspears]

Thanks Kommissar. It was a lot of work trying all the different combos. I even swapped hard drive around.

BUT it's still crazy to think that NOBODY has said that their 280 equipped machine will run a 1510 at N speeds.

Come on people, ANYBODY?

[reydemia]

Well my Mini 10v is coming in tonight(280/1510 combo), so i will reply then. However you are absolutely wrong about the bus speed. It was NOTHING to do with the wireless card, nothing at all. The bus speed only affects the RAM...the faster the bus speed the faster info can travel to and from the cpu to the RAM. However, seeing as the memory controller on the mini 10v is limited to 533...the faster bus speed in all technicality does nothing, everything will run the same as it does on the 270, you just get 60Mhz boost in processor speed. see what I mean nothing to do with the bus speed...if anything, it's all just driver issues, you'd be surprised how crappy most drivers actually are.

[gspears]

Well I hope you have better luck than I did. As for bus speed not affecting anything but cpu to memory, I did a ton of work with PCs as they were evolving and ran into many cards which would not work in PCI slots in faster machines because the PCI bus was faster. I don't know if the PCI slot for this mini network card runs the same speed between the two processors or not. But it wouldn't be the first time a faster buss speed has caused issues with PCI cards.

[woodscomp]

Maybe it was a bad batch of 1510's. Seems more likely than the board wich should be the same as the 270 board except for the soldered on processor.

[gspears]

Originally Posted by woodscomp

Maybe it was a bad batch of 1510's. Seems more likely than the board wich should be the same as the 270 board except for the soldered on processor.

That's what I thought might be the problem but all my 1510s work perfectly in my 10v's with 270 processors. So I don't believe the 1510s are the issue. Plus, it's the same driver for the all the 10v's, no matter which processor it has.

[reydemia]

Originally Posted by gspears

That's what I thought might be the problem but all my 1510s work perfectly in my 10v's with 270 processors. So I don't believe the 1510s are the issue. Plus, it's the same driver for the all the 10v's, no matter which processor it has.

Ahh I see your point on the bus speed issue now, interesting. Anyways, my mini 10v came in! I installed osx and got everything running perfectly! The N card works flawlessly with the 280. In fact it seems to have a much stronger connection than even my iMac fron the same room! Speeds are great and no flakey connection issues or anything. Guess I got lucky!

[woodscomp]

Maybe that's the reason for the BIOS revisions on the 10v?