I daily one of those Clevo whitelabel laptops for study and personal use, it's not fantastic but it suits my needs just fine.

One of the problems I have with it is the weak Wi-Fi reception, placing it 20 feet away from a 5GHz is enough to degrade link quality significantly (lag and jitters, link speed drop by more than half), closing a hollow wood door inbetween outright kills the connection.

The funny is that the connection is a lot more stable on my smartphone, signal degrades a bit less across rooms and obstacles, if I tether the connection and use it as a Wi-Fi card, I get better connectivity than the internal adapter, which is crazy, so this made me think about possible solutions.

Mainly I've been thinking about replacing the aging Intel AC9492 Wi-Fi card with an internal AX210 from ebay or Aliexpress, but I'm not sure that would really solve the problem.

I get better Wi-Fi signal if I flip the laptop so that the lower half stays vertical, which makes me think the antennas aren't positioned right (sitting upright?) or something. The cables go out the card and go to the screen half of the laptop, the hinges are attachable plastic and really flimsy, so I'm really hesitant about opening it and damaging the LCD panel or something.

I've seen external AX210-based cards being sold on Aliexpress, but I would like to avoid them if possible, it would be too much hassle since I tend to carry it along with me quite a bit, would also lose a scarce USB port.

Anyone who went through the same situation can share their experiences and how they've managed to fix the issue?