NOTE: This solution only works for rev. B of the DWA-160. If you have rev. A your chipset is the Atheros AR9001U-2NX which is a combination of the Atheros 9170 and 9104 chips on the adapter. I did not find a link on Atheros' website for direct downlading of drivers so if you have rev. A of this product you are probably stuck with obtaining drivers through the OEM (such as D-Link) which I have found is not kept up to date (see below). Rev. B of the DWA-160 uses the RT2870 chipset from Ralink and you can download the latest drivers directly from Ralink without having to wait for the OEM to catch up. Good luck!
I was having many of the same problems listed below...dropped connections...weak signal strength...etc. Then I found a solution.
Most of the problems described below are driver related. The problem is that, even though an updated driver is posted on D-Link's download page, you can't get to it because the link doesn't work properly (good job D-Link). No problem, just manually browse to the ftp site referenced in the link right? Wrong, even though you can actually successfully download the file in this manner and the file is dated 7-2-2008, the driver contained in the download is still the same one from 1-31-2008 version 1.01.01.0000. Once again, good job D-Link.
All sarcasm aside, there is a solution. Ralink as the actual manufacturer of these devices and lucky for us D-Link customers Ralink actually does have an updated driver posted on their website. The chip in the DWA-160 is the RT2870 and you can download the driver from Ralink's website. Simply Google "Ralink" and you will find their main page. At the top of their home page click on "Support" and then whatever your OS is (in my case it was "Windows"). The downloadable files are listed there. Again, look for RT2870. The driver I loaded is dated 6-10-2008 and is version 1.2.0.0. THANKS RALINK! YOU ROCK!!
One final note...I can not stress this enough...MAKE SURE YOU COMPLETELY UNINSTALL THE EXISTING DRIVER AND ALL RELATED APPLICATIONS FIRST. I have decided to use the Ralink utility instead of the one offered by D-Link because it is FAR superior. It not only displays signal strength, but noise strength too. It displays separate stats for send and receive levels and throughput. Since loading the new driver my connection has been rock solid at both 2.4 and 5 GHz.
I hope this helps.
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Topic: Solution to some (if not all) of these problems (for rev. B ONLY) (Read 11369 times)