Ubuntu – Connection drops after about 5 seconds and is real slow with a Centrino 1030 wireless card

This has happened to me twice on my netbook, thankfully not at home where all has been well.

The answer has been to walk away from the connection with the laptop for at least a few hours. While away from the connection, go into "Edit Connections" by clicking the wireless icon towards top right of the screen and delete the wireless connection you had a problem connecting to. When you next want to connect to it, it treats it as a new connection and works. Well it has for me twice, I hope it does for you.

Further hardware testing

Your 1-day test in Win7 may be inconclusive. The Windows 7 driver may "drive" the wireless card differently than the Linux driver. If the Windows driver doesn't stress the wireless card in the same way, you may not see the wireless card drop off as quickly. If testing the card from Windows, I'd running it a couple days. A better test would be using an older version of Ubuntu that you have used in the past without trouble.

Don't trust the Dell diagnostic either. If their diagnostic passed, that just means that the card was functioning when they ran the diagnostic. If an electrical component on the card is malfunctioning, it may work fine after a reboot, like my friend's did, but only for a time. I had a friend that was experiencing similar issues on a Windows laptop (and using an Ubuntu LiveUSB on the same machine). My friend's card would pass diagnostic tests too because they could only be run after a reboot when the card was working. I replaced my friend's wireless card, and all of his problems went away.

From what I can tell online, it looks like your wireless card provides WiFi and Bluetooth. If the Bluetooth also stops working at the same time as the WiFi, it's more than likely that your wireless card is faulty.

Here are some things you can try for the purpose of troubleshooting:
Ignore the options you've already tried. I've only included them for the sake of anyone else who might stumble upon this post looking for answers.

• Download an old version of Ubuntu that you know the WiFi had no issues with (12.04?) and see if your WiFi drops while running the LiveOS. If it does, your wireless card is most likely faulty and needs to be replaced.
• Clone your existing system. Then blow everything away with a Windows install and see if you experience the same issues in Windows. If you do, it's time to replace the internal WiFi card. Restore the cloned image.
• If you have a spare hard drive lying around, pull the one in your computer, and install the spare. Then install Windows and see if issue persists. If it does, it's time to replace the internal WiFi card.
• Don't test anything. Just open your computer and yank the wireless card. Buy a replacement with the same model number. They're usually pretty cheap. I paid less than $10 (in China) for my friend's replacement. Drop it in. If the problem goes away, then the old card was obviously faulty. If it persists, then you're out the price of the card.
• Finally, whether the internal card is faulty or it's a hardware incompatibility problem, you should be able to buy a USB WiFi dongle and use that. Most are compatible with Linux these days. Unfortunately, most low-profile USB WiFi dongles have weaker reception than your internal card and won't come with Bluetooth which your internal card may or may not provide.