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Forum Discussion
RAX-35 causing frequent disconnects with Surface Pro 5th-gen
I picked up a Nighthawk AX4 4-Sream AX3000 (model RAX35) a few weeks ago as a replacement/upgrace from a TP-Link Archer. For the most part, it's worked well, with one glaring issue - it essentially has torpedoed the wifi on my 5th-generation Surface Pro. I get decent speed, and depending on the use case (streaming the signal from the Xbox One has been particularly terrible), it will simply drop the connection and force a reconnect. A couple times it's actually appeared to kill the Marvell wireless driver (I had to reboot), and I've started hitting blue-screens as well - the errors in the BSODs were not explicitly linked to the wireless driver as best I can tell, but I will say that I only started noticing them when I got the router.
I do realize this could be coincidence, but I'm reasonably sure that the router is the issue - I swapped back to the TP-Link yesterday and couldn't recreate the connectivity drops or the blue-screens, although it's unpredictable enough that I don't have a specific way to trigger it.
Anyone have any great ideas? I'm considering a "refresh" (appears to be a reinstall of Windows) on the Surface in case there's something corrupted with the drivers or something (although sfc /scannow didn't find anything), as it's thankfully not something I keep a lot of important data/apps installed on, but I'd rather not go through that if there's something I can fix in configuration - I've done explicit firmware and Windows Update checks pretty much daily since this happens, so I don't really think it's firmware or drivers (unless it's a system-level corruption).
13 Replies
Hello BeefMaster,
Welcome to the community! Wanted to see if you were able to do a "refresh" and if so I'm curious to hear your results.Best,
Christian
Fortunately, it didn't come to that - I realized that I had not tried out the 5GHz wifi band, so I switched to that network ID, and I haven't had the problem since. It's still a BIT of a pain - my internet service doesn't have that much bandwidth, so I get no benefit from the speed, and the decreased range gives me a mediocre signal in a couple spots in my house - but I was not looking forward to reinstalling the Surface and honestly didn't expect that to work, so I'm okay with that as the solution.
Confirmation...
Nighthawk AX4: RAX35 Firmware Version V1.0.3.62_1.0.1
I experienced the same thing on two different Surface Pro 4 laptops with the RAX-35 (why isn't this router in the model list with the half million other options to choose from?).
My daughter has a Surface Pro 4 that has been experiencing random and frequent BSODs, usually after a few minutes of running her laptop. This started just recently after she moved back home to take classes virtually. After the next discovery below, we went back into her event log and it showed the system had crashed two times before, and both were when she was at my house for the weekend. No other device seemed to be affected except hers. I think it was occasionally connecting to 5G and running stable, but 5G doesn't reach every corner of the house...
In a panic to find a solution to her inabilty to take a test virtually we borrowed my girlfirends surface pro 4 (also model #1724), which has never previously had a BSOD (ever), but had never been connected to this router before. My daughter logged on and it ran fine until we connected it to the wifi (2.4GHz). I put in the wifi password and it tried to connect but didn't show internet available. I did a web login from a hardwired pc to the router and although it claimed internet connection was good on the router home page, the internet "test" never reached the NETGEAR web page that it was supposed to show "if a successful internet connectoin is detected". (PC hardwired through same router having no access problems). I rebooted the modem, and when it came back I tried logging onto the wifi on the surface pro. As soon as I refreshed the "no internet" firefox page, the system crashed (BSOD). After the reboot it crashed again simply by connecting to the wifi at the sign on screen. We disabled the wifi and it started and ran fine. One last confirmation and it crashed again immediately upon connecting to the 2.4G. Clearly something wrong.
I tried disabling AX on the router and we thought this had solved it, but it only added some time to the stability window. After a few minutes it crashed again. We figured out how to enable the wireless card to accept 5G, and it seems to be stable running on 5G like OP stated. Only about an hour so far of testing though..
Previously we had tried all sorts of things related to rolling back drivers and windows knowledge base updates. I had nearly given up and bought a new surface pro from Amazon to replace my daughers "broken" surface pro, but it turns out maybe I just needed to replace my broken Netgear router. I thought I was buying quality given how much I spent, but clearly its doing something non-standard. .
- I experienced this as well, Netgear had no real solution and switched back to my TP-Link that works flawlessly. It's unfortunate that a much cheaper router can provide better stability than the RAX35.
