Wireless connection not working

[senior4Mint16]

Hello: I am fairly new to Linux Mint and am still on a bit of a learning curve but I enjoy the OS over the former "big name" system. Having said that I am experiencing a problem that is causing me to loose faith:

I recently upgraded to Mint 18.1 on a Wind U210 notebook and it is no longer possible to establish a wireless connection via the internal wireless adapter ( a Ralink RT 3090 802.11n card). I must now use a separate usb wireless adapter (Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI unit) to establish a connection but things are still not running correctly as a "connected" window keeps popping up periodically while browsing and site loading has slowed to a crawl ( 20-25 seconds) on average. At times it seems that both cards are running simultaneously as the wireless signal level indicates numbers such as 127% ??? but the connection fails when the Ralink usb adapter is removed.

I have reviewed the Linux wireless connection problems and tried some of the suggested remedies but they appear to be for other versions of Mint and I'm afraid I have gummed up the works big time.

I am under the impression there is a driver problem with the notebook's internal wireless card but entering updated driver info as per some recommendations has no effect. I am now reduced to using my wife's discarded desktop running XP to try to find an answer to get 18.1 functioning efficiently.

Would it be best to wipe the current version and revert to an older one which had been running much better than 18.1??

[JeremyB]

It sounds like a problem caused by wifi power management being enabled

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sudo sed -i 's/wifi.powersave = 3/wifi.powersave = 2/' /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf

Code: Select all

systemctl restart network-manager.service

I doubt that your USB is Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 as that is a common ethernet device