Solution to Wi-Fi problems on HP laptops with Realtek RTL8723BE NICs (2016)

This should have a [2016] tag, also wondering why this pops up on HN all of a sudden?<p>It&#x27;s been a long known issue with some WiFi cards (not just the RTL cards) that some manufacturers don&#x27;t connect both antennae on some models of portables, so you should update your configuration accordingly (on Linux), or use the driver supplied by the machine manufacturer (with the correct config) rather than downloading the driver from the RTL website.

This is not only for HP(see it in Acer, Lenovo... ). They leave the one ANT connector disconnected on cheap laptops because there is no antenna for it.<p>Drivers will default to a mixed mode where both antennas work(one receiving one transmitting), now if you install drivers on Windows from official driver package it will work as intended because install will configure drivers to only user ANT1. And you can do it manually if you chose not to install drivers, &quot;the official&quot; way.<p>I&#x27;m not making an apology for mentioned companies just clarifying that this is known thing for cheap laptops.

Great, already replaced that laptop with a thinkpad. Never buying or recommending an HP laptop ever again.

I thought this was never going to be fixed on my Lenovo Yoga laptop. Many wifi-dongles later I went wired ethernet with a crossover cable to a Chromebook that may not have niceties like a CPU but it does stay locked on to the weakest wifi signal in a highly congested area.<p>I rate the likelihood of this fixing anything as highly unlikely - compiled, installed, rebooted with both wifi aerial options and the machine is still somewhat deaf.

The title&#x2F; synopsis is somewhat misleading. While it may have been a HP problem there&#x27;s no mention of the specific fault. Indeed it&#x27;s just a script to download and install the latest rtlwifi drivers. Also given that apt is mentioned in the script I guess this seen on Debian&#x2F; Ubuntu distros (unsure of version), but who knows other distros that may ship later drivers may be fine.<p>TL;DR Vague repo is vague.

I don&#x27;t know what the bug is, but if it&#x27;s a hardware problem, can&#x27;t HP be forced to fix it under warranty?

Readme is extremely brief. Looking in install.sh, it&#x27;s just a wrapper around another repository: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lwfinger&#x2F;rtlwifi_new" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lwfinger&#x2F;rtlwifi_new</a>

My HP x360 had a little wifi trouble at first on every linux distribution. I actually had a bash script on USB to fix the issue until there was better support. In the past few months, Ubuntu and OpenSuSE have worked out of the box.

I actually noticed this on most newer cheap laptops. It&#x27;s annoying, but can be fixed (I think, I haven&#x27;t tried) by buying a cheap (less than $1) Drone antenna from China (2.4G models) and plugging it into the other port.

My solution was to replace the realtek with a $16 intel based wifi card. I spent some time trying to fix the realtek but ultimately my time is money.

I have a 3-year old HP LT which, when Windows 8 was installed, never had wifi issues. When Windows 10 came on, it started dropping the connection. Some times, I could reconnect but usually, it had to be rebooted. I tried new drivers and suggestions I found but nothing solved the problem. Finally, I bought one of those USB WiFi dongles, configured the system to use it, and my network issues went away. I have no idea if this is a solution to the original problem but I&#x27;ll stick with the dongle as long as its working.