WLAN in 4810T is a sleepy N

Acer Aspire 4810T boasts support to the super fast N type WLAN networks. That is all good. What may become to you as a surprise is the way this has been combined with the power saving features to make the usage time extend to the promised eight hours (well, almost...).

Owners of 4810T seem to be having problems with getting WLAN to work. Partly because you must get the settings right; partly because you have to get the newest updates in palace in the computer to make it work properly. After all of this has been done there still remains a very infuriating feature with the WLAN.

The WLAN module in the Acer machine seems to want to go to a power-down sleep mode very frequently and against any settings in the Windows operating system. The symptom of this are frequent reports by email software and web browsers of the connection failing to respond. The actual error messages you see are various and usually not at all related to the WLAN module itself; usually you see a message indicating that reading or updating a page is taking too long or that the internet connection for some reason seems to be down.

Waking the WLAN module inside the computer seems to take a long time -- my experience is about 5...10 seconds. The computer hardware seems to occasionally fail to actually get the hint to kick up the WLAN module. When this happens one is left in a limbo with (for example) the web page read never completing and a constant error message coming up in the browser. This is enough to drive you mad because you know the problem is not the internet connection or the web page, but the computer WLAN module, and because there is nothing you can do to fix it.

I need to make sure you understand that the computer hardware is perfectly healthy. There is no hardware problem -- the problem is the way Acer has programmed the hardware to behave.

Once the WLAN module goes to sleep to save power there are certain tricks you can pull to jump start the module. For example, you can repeatedly re-load the web page (after a few reload attempts the WLAN starts and presto, everything works again); you can exit the web browser and restart it (this seems to generate the message that WLAN is needed); you can have some continuous download on such as a web radio station playing and generating a continuous data transmission on the WLAN module to keep the module awake.

If you are interested in the technical details, I have BIOS v. 1.28 and I have seen this problem with Windows Vista and now with Windows 7. For both operating system, with the newest updates from Acer.

To give you an example how this problem manifests right now, while I am writing this blog the user interface saves my edits regularly. The saves happen too infrequently and the WLAN module seems to switch into the sleep mode. The result is that the save operation that should take a small fraction of a second actually takes up to 10 seconds to complete, with most of the time spent waiting the WLAN module to wake up and do something.

Intel's problem report explains how to fix this problem. Intel's instructions must be slightly modified for Windows 7 because the relevant controls are found in the Power Settings. Navigate to Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options. Select the Change Plan settings | Change Advanced Power Settings. There you will find the WLAN sections.