Surface Pro 3 - Windows 10 - WiFi (slow or limited connectivity )

Anonymous
2015-07-30T14:16:39+00:00

Have a Surface Pro 3 that worked fine till I updated to Win10.  Now the wireless connection seems to randomly go to a "limited connectivity" mode.  Fortunately was purchased from Costco a coupe of weeks ago so it is going back there if we can't get this figured out by Sunday.

The Surface Pro3 is a flagship device - why in the world would you subject your customers to have to resort to looking for help in forums like this?

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous
2015-11-13T10:20:54+00:00

Everyone,

Build 10586 - the November Windows 10 update - was released yesterday, and it contains a newer Marvell wireless driver 15.68.9032.47 - people are reporting that this greatly improves wireless connectivity. Please download the large update, and if you used the registry hack, reverse it as follows:

Press Windows button. Search for regedit. Open it

  1. Navigate to the following path:

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\mrvlpcie8897

  1. Find the item labeled “TXAMSDU”. Double tap and modify the value from 0 to 1
  2. Restart the machine

Then test your connectivity, and post results.

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Anonymous
2015-11-13T10:44:26+00:00

Fred,

the November Windows 10 update to build 10586 has new wireless drivers. Can you download and install the update (it should be offered via WU) and let us know if this changes your connectivity?

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Anonymous
2015-08-05T18:12:39+00:00

Penny,

These kinds of issues WERE present on 8.1 for months but they mostly all cleared after several driver updates.

And that particular router is not one known to exhibit slow wifi. I'm suggesting you trade it because it is SP new and you can now get one with 10 pre-installed and not have to go through an upgrade AND because you have this issue. Getting it swapped will rule out a hardware issue and would be a step forward.

This is what *I* would do if in this situation.

For what it's worth - Microsoft needs to fix the driver and any underlying Win 10 OS issues. It took them 9 months to get a "good" Windows 8.1 wireless driver. For now, consider an external USB wireless adapter. I carry around a http://www.amazon.com/Edimax-EW-7811UTC-Dual-Band-Connectivity-Exceeding/dp/B00FW6T36Y

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-10-07T08:42:29+00:00

    Split from this thread.

    In my case, I was not using Kapersky and the Wifi issue still occured. In fact, for troubleshooting, I tried the nuclear option 3 times and ensured that nothing was installed except Windows itself, and the Wifi issue still occured. (This was a few days ago before I found this thread.)

    (i) After the firmware upgrade, Wifi was broken (red X). Device manager showed the device was normal, but the Network pane showed no Wifi device. Restart did not help, but I was able to restore Wifi by disabling and reenabling the driver. Although the Wifi came back, Network test showed that the download speed is almost 100M (the highest speed in my Internet connection), while the upload speed was 0.2M and dropping until the test failed. In actual usage, the web connection appeared slow and constantly broke, and onenote seemed to be unable to download my notebook (it hung in download forever). 

    (ii) Since I could not believe Windows 10 would not work on Microsoft's own device, and I thought it had to be some third party software causing the problem, I factory reimaged back to Windows 8.1, applied all the Windows update, and then Windows 10. This time the Wifi survived after the firmware upgrade but the upload was still broken. 

    (iii) I tried the nuclear option once more, and immediately update to Windows 10 (without applying Windows 8.l updates first). Still the Wifi upload was broken. I did a "ping" test with various payload size, and found good performance up to 1450 bytes, but complete failure for 1500 bytes or above. Since 1500 bytes was about the size of the Wifi MTU, it seemed there was some network issue if the packet needed to be fragmented.

    I fixed the Wifi performance by loaded old drivers (from the 2015/09/15 driver pack), but then bluetooth broke. The system reported the pen as paired but it did not response to the pen button. I unpaired and re-paired, but the system could not detect the pen. I fixed that by rolling back the bluetooth driver. Still many small things appeared broken and there was errors reported in the event viewer. I worried Windows 10 on SP3 was still unstable and Microsoft could force another broken update at any time, I decided to apply the nuclear option again and stayed with Windows 8.1 for now.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-10-06T09:55:20+00:00

    what version of the Marvell wifi driver are you using and have you tried other older versions?

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