Dell Venue 8 Pro & Wifi Connection Issues

I am an owner of the Dell Venue 8 Pro since it has been out and to be honest, for a device that I only paid $299, I am extremely happy about it. It's not a powerful device where I can use it as a replacement of my laptop or my desktop... Not even close! But... It is very useful to use it as an extension of your desktop. It can easily run most of the modern desktop applications like Microsoft Office 2013, iTunes, all browsers, VLC player and this all by multi-tasking. You could write your email while listening music on your iTunes and downloading some new stuff on your tablet. The fact that it has a full desktop version of Windows 8.1, you could run pretty much any application on it. I mostly use it for business applications that cannot run on any other platform than Windows.


Now, of course it's not a perfect device. The downside is the small screen. Using desktop applications on a 8' screen with a resolution of 1280X800 is not easy thing to do. Thanks to Windows 8.1 DPI Settings improvements, it can at least be adjusted now.




Another down side WAS the wireless adapter would disappear from the device manager for no reason. This device has a "Dell Wireless 1538 Adapter". This would not happen everywhere, for example, at work, I had never an issue but at my home, with my D-Link wireless router, sometimes it would stay connected for hours sometimes it would just disable the wireless network card. At the beginning I thought it might be a problem with my router but I had no problem with my other wireless devices... I finally decided to find a solution or I was even ready to call Dell or Microsoft support for that, but before, let me do a googling.




Apparently, the reason to this behaviour was 2 Windows Updates! To resolve this issue with any Dell Wireless 1538 Adapters, uninstall the following 2 updates;




- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2887595
- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2903939




Although, they seemed to fix a lot of other issues on the description page, but it sure screws up your wireless adapter. So the choice is yours;




To remove these updates from your computer;




1- Go to "Control Panel", "Windows Update"
2- On the left pane, click on "Installed Updates"
3- From this list, find the updates "KB2887595" and "KB2903939"




Cheers.