So my girlfriend recently purchased a Lenovo G580 with Windows 8 pre-installed. When we turned on the laptop for the first time, it booted up and the wireless card wasn’t picking up any network connections at all even though I could connect on my Windows Phone. We moved the laptop right next to the router to see if it could find it and it did find it then. Every time we moved away however, it would just disconnect. We thought that it could have been a driver issue so we took to the internet for a solution and guess what, we didn’t find one. However, we did see so many other people complaining about the same issue.
Here is your solution guys! If you’re having Lenovo G580 WiFi issues and your laptop comes with the Qualcomm Atheros WiFi card, it may be that the wires for the antenna aren’t connected properly. Every laptop I’ve ever had, the white cable has been the main cable and the black being the AUX. However, when we opened up the bottom of the laptop I noticed that they were the other way, and it also has them labelled to be the other way… So I just went ahead and switched those bad boys over and hurrah! The WiFi was picking up as it normally should with finding all connections in the area with full signal.
So for all people with a Qualcomm Atheros AR9485WB-EG wireless card or even if it’s just your Lenovo G580 playing up, please take a look at the cables for the device by opening up the bottom of your case. The wireless card looks like the picture above and should have two cables attached. Don’t worry, they aren’t soldered. They just click in so it is very easy to swap them over. Now this probably isn’t the right fix and maybe the way Qualcomm have labelled their card is correct, but this solved the issue with my girlfriends wireless on her Lenovo G580 with a Qualcomm Atheros AR9485WB-EG so please give it a good look and just swap them over. If it doesn’t work you can always swap them back.
Source: jamescroft.co.uk
