How do I get my laptop and my home wifi to play nice?
May 25, 2011 3:25 PM   Subscribe

Wifi pitifully slow on my laptop at home, when laptop everywhere else is OK and other devices at home are OK. What do I do?

I've googled for known issues and am not finding anything, but maybe I'm just not technical enough (I'm not very technical) to know what I'm missing.

Here's the situation:
-I'm using a Lenovo Thinkpad x201 with an Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6200 AGN wireless adapter. Windows 7.
-Wifi works just fine in the office, Starbucks, airports, hotels, etc.
-Here at home, wifi on my laptop is pathetically slow. So slow that gMail (and other sites) will sometimes just give up and tell me they can't load the page.
-Some occasions seem to be worse than others, but I can't really quantify that.
-Router is an AirPort Extreme Base Station. ISP is Comcast.
-I sometimes use a VPN, but speed is bad even when the VPN is off. (When the VPN is on, it's definitely worse.)
-My husband's Mac has no speed problems when on the wifi network, nor do my old Lenovo laptop or my iPhone.
-Signal strength shows all green bars. (99% signal with speed of 108.0 Mbps)
-Lenovo's "Run Diagnostics" section of Acess Connections says everything's just peachy.
-I have similar issues whether I use our secured network (WPA2-PSK/AES) or our guest network

This has been going on for months, but I'm very pregnant now and really would like to be able to work from home more. Which is only an option if I have decent internet access. And I need to use wifi because the cable connection is in the living room but if I work in there, my toddler, well, he'd appropriate my keyboard for drum practice.

Any ideas for how I trouble-shoot / fix this?
posted by CruiseSavvy to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I asked a question a couple years ago where the problem was basically "Access Connections is screwing things up." Ever since then I've kept it disabled and I haven't experienced any problems. Maybe the answers there will help you.
posted by phunniemee at 3:33 PM on May 25, 2011


One thought (from having to play with it myself at home) - If you can change the channel the AE is broadcasting on, see if it makes a difference - I have one machine that just would not see my router unless I changed from Channel 11 to 6.
posted by pupdog at 3:38 PM on May 25, 2011


When you plug in directly to the router (cable) with wifi off are you also having speed issues? Doing this will identify if the issue is WiFi related or something else specific to your computer.

Once you have identified that the issue is solely wifi (i.e. the speed improves with the ethernet cable in) related then I would plug in a usb wifi adapter and turn your internal wifi off. Does the speed stay the same or improve? Doing this will help narrow down the problem to your wifi card of something in the software/drivers/start-up programs. If the speed does improve when you plug in an external USB then you either have a bad wifi card and/or antenna. The antenna is least likely but before purchasing another wifi card (maybe 30 or 40 bucks) I'd pop the access door and reseat the antenna cable and see what happens.

FWIW 90%+ of the windows laptops that that I encounter with slow internet speeds are caused by some interfering software program (your VPN is suspect) , something in the startup, or some malware. The fact that your signal stregnth and speed indicators seem to be in the norm makes me suspect some interfering program and/or malware as a first possibility but you still have to rule out any hardware issues first anyway to be sure .
posted by Poet_Lariat at 5:20 PM on May 25, 2011


My advice would be to turn OFF the "Guest Network"... then test for a few days and see if that fixes your problem. I also have an Airport Extreme.. and from what I can tell it works like this:

1.) If you have dual-band turned ON (IE = secure network & a "guest" network).. then your secure network uses the 2.5ghz antenna.. and the Guest network uses the 5ghz antenna (and there's no way to change that). In other words, the Guest network is twice as fast.

2.) If you disable the Guest network... and only have a single network (secure)... it will use both antenna.. .and devices attempting to connect will get whichever fastest speed they can handle. (IE = having a single network "shares" both antennas and works at both speeds).

Unless I'm totally understanding it wrong.. but all I know at home (having the same router) is when I turned off the Guest network.. everything is much more reliable and much faster.
posted by jmnugent at 5:20 PM on May 25, 2011


Had same problem and could not figure it out, but then I updated my router's firmware and all was back to normal. (Login to your router admin and look for router firmware updates.)

I had previously ruled out the router because it had been working fine previously.

Just a thought.
posted by thorny at 5:38 PM on May 25, 2011


This may have nothing to do with your problem, but I've had poor internet experiences when the DNS server is wrong. For the case where you're not using the VPN, you can try and see if the setting the primary and secondary DNS servers to the Google DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) helps.
posted by simongsmith at 6:14 PM on May 25, 2011


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