Thinkpads Forum

I recently got an X200s, and I'm getting really slow network speeds. I swapped out the card for one I had in another laptop that I know works fine, and it's still bad. I did a speed test, and got less than 0.5 Mbps download and upload. What could be causing this?

Try updating your drivers.

I can Assure you that the issue is not drivers.

possibly the card has gone bad. this happens sometimes.

you can try to replace it with a replacement card and see if it gets better.

personally i encountered some failures of Intel 5100 few years back when everyone in my household daily drove T500, contemporary to X200s. i would usually replace them with Intel Advanced N 6205 since i had a lot of those as spares. these cards are dirt cheap. but this swap requires a whitelist-removed modified BIOS for T500 which I had/have since no T500 ever came with Advanced N 6205, it is from newer models.

X200s as with most ThinkPads has a whitelist on the WLAN slot so if you cannot source an official Lenovo Intel 5100 or 5300 WLAN card, you would have to flash a modified BIOS to replace the card with a non-period correct and non-OEM card.

This modified BIOS should work. https://www.mediafire.com/file/2ef354zi ... L.rar/file

AFAIK X200 and X200s are the same as far as BIOS is concerned. here's an official Lenovo readme for the official version of that BIOS, supporting as such "Support models ThinkPad X200, X200s" : https://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/p ... uj48us.txt


you can also go to bestbuy and buy a USB-based WLAN, and that will just work.

I already tried replacing the card, as I said in my original post, nothing changed.

apologies. i must have skipped over that. my bad.

something could be wrong with the access point or the Operating System.

how close can you get to the access point? is speed still crappy right next to it?

in my experience with X-series my X230 has goddawful wireless reception, every other laptop I own is better than that X-series, i know it's not X200s but it's the closest I've got to one.

Got like a meter away from the router, was still slow. Also, I have an X200 Tablet that works perfectly fine with an identical OS config (I use a declarative system).

i wonder if the antennas and/or their cabling have broken or become damaged somehow.

best of luck figuring this out.

Dirt/bad contacts in the wifi-switch on the left?

TPFanatic wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 24, 2025 7:33 pm

i wonder if the antennas and/or their cabling have broken or become damaged somehow.

This is my suspicion as well. I've personally seen an Intel 4965AGN detect WiFi signals (though unable to actually connect to routers) even without any antenna attached. A cable with a break somewhere in the middle would still work as an antenna, albeit poorly.

The other suspect is software, which can be verified by running a different operating system--one reason I carry around a portable SSD with Linux installed.