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Alert

False advertisement - no "dual band" WiFi card in Inspiron

Feb 4, 2014 12:27AM PST

Dell falsely advertised that Inspiron 7537 laptop has a dual-band wireless card. I bought one only to find out about this little "mistake" when it was too late, the laptop arrived with a subpar single-band card that is super slow and drops connection frequently.

Three chats with Dell Customer "Care" and two phone conversations with their tech "support" later, they didn't even pretend to try and work out a solution or to offer any assistance. Tech support sends me to customer care, customer care back to tech support, then it bounces around couple more times, then they give me yet another number to call where they, sure enough, never pick up the phone.

That's what you get from Dell after they've swindled you out of $1500+.

Discussion is locked

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Other Dell misleading you Dual-band
Feb 12, 2014 2:29AM PST

may not be your issue. 2.4 ghz has an advantage over 5 ghz in that it is better as far as distance of the signal and is typically the better solution for home networks.

http://compnetworking.about.com/od/wirelessfaqs/f/5ghz-gear.htm

Also it could be your router causing the drop. I recently moved to lightning internet from Bright House and they installed a Motorola modem/router and that dropped connection once a day. When they installed the modem i disconnected the modem. Bright House changed the PW and i couldn't get into configure the router. I attached my router into the modem and I never drop a signal. Now sometimes when my laptop recovers from sleeping it connects back to the Motorola router and I just reconnect it the my Linksys. I actually did a speed test and it's actually faster also.

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personal experience
Feb 12, 2014 5:31AM PST

I have three other laptops (macbook pro, dell vostro, system76 galago) - all with dual-band wireless cards. So I have extensively tested 2.4 vs 5 GHz setup first hand. Long story short, 2.4 in general is totally inferior to 5. Even speed is at least 5 times slower. This comes from my personal experience, not google. Furthermore, this particular cheapo card that Dell puts in $1500 laptop is even below crap level, its best has been 0.5 Mb/sec so far, while other laptops give me 9+ Mb/sec on local wireless LAN. It's real megabytes, by the way, not millionbits.

What makes it even worse is that Dell won't make any effort to rectify their screw up. They simply ignore you after they got your money.