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paradeigmas's avatar
paradeigmas
Tutor
Jul 30, 2015
Solved

Windows 10 (A6100 A6200 A6210) Installation Heads Up

As a heads up, DO NOT install Netgear's driver package for your A6xxx device on Windows 10.  It permanently removes Windows 10’s ability to access the WiFi Connections list.   Instead, use the defa...
Installation
Troubleshooting
  • Chosey's avatar
    Chosey
    Aug 01, 2015

    For problems with the windows 10 included driver with the a6210 (e.g. no 5ghz networks visible) just use the latest driver from mediatek (5.1.21.0). 

     

    It is the newer version of the driver that came with windows 10 and with it i can join my 5ghz wlan, which wasnt able with the old one!

     

    The chip in the A6210 is a Mediatek MT7612U.

     

    http://www.mediatek.com/en/downloads1/downloads/usb/

kogimus's avatar
kogimus
Aspirant
Sep 10, 2015

 

Adding myself to the list, because this is, frankly, unacceptable.

A $50 paperweight, as it drops packets erratically enough to make any sort of gaming, most WAN streaming, and a large portion of LAN streaming useless.

 

  1. What model of adaptor are you having issues with?

A6210 fresh from the package

  1. Is the Win10 install a fresh install or an upgrade?

Upgrade

  1. If an upgrade, from what version of Windows?

Win10 Developer's Preview upgraded to Windows 10 professional

  1. What is the H/W model of the PC/tablet/netbook?

Custom build : 
Asus Sabertooth 990FX motherboard

AMD FX-8350 Processor

Dual R9 270s

24GB DDR3 RAM

60GB Agility 3 SSD main drive

dual 10k RPM 1TB SATAIII RAID 0+1 storage

  1. What driver version are you attempting to install?

1st attempt : Netgear A6210v1.0.0.32

2nd attempt : Mediatek 1.5.39.126

3rd attempt : default windows drivers

 

  1. Did you try installing with AV / Firewall disabled?

Yes.

  1. What error messages do you see?

Unless you can count "erratically dropping packets or ping response times jumping up to the 3-4s range" as an error message, none.

  1. If no error messages what failure of functionality do you see?

See Above

 

Look, is there a debug log i can check to see what (if any) errors are being generated internally for the interface? I'm not seeing anything in the event viewer, but, the error KIND of seems like despite being configured to not do so, the device is being powered down momentarily, causing the TCP handshakes to get out of sync (hence the absurdly high ping responses/time outs on an otherwise good connection).

 

The reason for my guess on the "momentary powerdown" hypothesis is that i can cause it to *not* drop packets if I run something that is relatively high-bandwidth usage (say, copying a 2GB file from my NAS to a local folder and back) for as long as that file transfer is running...perhaps there's an "idle threshold" value somewhere that's set too low, causing the system to see "oh, device is at or below idle threshold" and start to power it down (we'll ignore the "it's set to not do that", because.. that's possibly related to the same underlying issue) when all one is doing is non-intensive activities (streaming video, playing an online game, etc), but that threshold is met when doing things that are more intensive?