You may have read my rant earlier about problems with slow transfers on my Acer 9810 with the Intel 3945abg wireless adapter. I decided to check out Intel’s site and see what type of drivers they had available. It is not generally a good idea to put generic drivers on a system that may have been customized by the OEM but in this case I didn’t think I had much to lose.

After searching their site I was able to locate an updated driver that was released after Windows Vista and decided to give it a try. It installed without any problems and my connection is now normal. My connection rate jumped from 60% to 99% immediately for both my D-Link and Belkin wireless routers.

Unfortunately it did not correct the problem where the network becomes disabled if I attempt to make a connection with Remote Desktop. I’m going to make the assumption at this point that the problem is actually a Windows Vista or Norton issue. I don’t have much experience with Norton as I usually immediately delete it from a system and install McAfee. I started doing this early in the deployment of Windows 2000 as I noticed that many things were passing thru Norton that McAfee would catch. I will get into this further when I have time and hopefully get the problem straightened out. My first test will be to disable Norton and see if the RDP 6.0 connection can go thru unhindered.

Intel network cards have always worked well from my experience and I don’t doubt that the 3945abg is a decent piece of hardware. If you are interested in this fix, at least until Acer releases custom drivers, if that should ever happen, you can find the Intel version on their website here: Intel Pro/Wireless 3945abg Drivers for Windows Vista.