I’ve got a D620 with the broadcom 1390 wireless. Installed Mandriva 2009 spring and the wireless works perfectly. No ndis wrapper. Even with WEP and/or WPA works great.

HOWEVER, in windows, this thing does not want to connect to my wireless router. It used to but doesn’t anymore. Every once in a while, it will connect and stay connected for a few minutes or longer but it will always disconnect. When it does connect it is extremely slow.

I thought maybe a hacker had assumed this laptops MAC since I was only running WEP. Converted network to WPA2 (what a pain, easy but have 4 laptops at home, one linksys router running ddwrt acting as bridge for DVR and Slingbox, one linksys router running tomato acting as wireless bridge for desktop, wii, and PS3 – all had to be changed)

The all connect expcept this one D620 when in windows. I have triple checked the key. One note: the router (dlink dir655) is set to use both WPA and WPA2. The tomato router won’t do WPA2 when not running as Access point so it had to be set to WPA – it works. The D620 if you use windows to manage settings will support either wpa or wpa2. However, the dell wireless wlan card utility only support wpa. I’ve tried every combination with/without utility and wpa/wpa2 and still have the same problem.

One piece of note was, out of the box my wireless only half worked (huge packet loss etc). At some point, system upgrade fixed it and now it works great.

Also, if you do find the need to replace your wireless card, be careful, because minipci cards are not always compatible, and some bios’s have whitelists for which ones will work. And ndiswrapper is always worth a shot if nothing else is working.

Good luck!

09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5752 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card (rev 01)

So apparently I have a different WLAN Card. It is detected correctly though. I didn’t know that DELL was shipping different flavours of the Broadcom WLAN Card.

Which version of the bcm43xx-fwcutter did you use? I just took the one which was in Synaptic (Feisty).

sharms@locksly:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 01)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 01)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 01)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 01)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
03:01.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ601/6912/711E0 CardBus/SmartCardBus Controller (rev 40)
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5752 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4310 UART (rev 01)

So, back to your comment. Does that mean, you don’t have any problems with WPA? Could you do me a favour and just try a WEP network quickly, so that I can see whether it is really a general broadcom D620 issue?
I would really appreciate that, as I haven’t come across somebody like you who really has exactly the same machine like I have.

Thanks, mate.

I own a D620 myself and I also read your blog entry about the broadcom wlan card. I installed the bcm43xx-fwcutter and wlan worked fine… until I wanted to connect to a WEP-secured WLAN.

The stupid thing just won’t connect to an encrypted WLAN. I tried the Network Manager and I tried the good old iwconfig-ifconfig-dhclient-way. I just don’t get any IP-address assigned in an encrypted WLAN. And I tried several networks which work fine under Windows.

I tested it at home as well. As soon as I disable WEP via my router’s web panel, I can connect. When I re-enabel WEP, I can’t connect.

Any suggestions?