Improving wi fi transmission receiving speed.

[Soxer]

Through a process of elimination, I have discovered my lptop for a lonmg time in it's 2 year life has poor download speeds over wi fi. My phone on the same network or a tablet are faster.

Therefore, I can;t blame the Virgin router.

If anyone can recommend a way of improving the performance, I 'd be grateful. I wondered if disabling the on board wireless and using an USB adapter might work?

Any ideas please?  Keith

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi, Keith:

What model wifi adapter does your notebook have?

f you don't know, go to the device manager, click to expand the network adapters device manager category, and there you will find the name and model number of the wifi adapter.

[Soxer]

Hi Paul, thank you for responding so quickly.

I opened device manager and there are two showing, though which one is in use I don't know.  

Intel dual band wireless AC3165

Microsoft wi fi direct virtual adapter

Does this help ?

Keith

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome, Keith.

The Intel 3165 AC is a fairly good model adapter.

That adapter should be giving you a maximum throughput of 433 MBPS on the 5.0 Ghz AC wifi band.

So, if you have good signal strength, you should be getting close to that as far as download speeds are concerned (or what you are paying for if less).

You could try updating the wifi driver to the latest version if you have not done so already...

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/28276/Intel-PROSet-Wireless-Software-and-Drivers-for-Windo...

[Soxer]

I will try that at home tonight, thank you for the link. 

I use speedtest to test my download speed should I rely on that to test or is there an better alternative ?

I was at one point blaming Virgin you see, as I have 100mb/sec fibre.

I was getting about 20 Mb if that, but other devices were way up.

I just want to make sure the laptop is running at its best. It's a nice machine esp since I prized it open and upgraded to 16 Gb of RAM.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Yes, that card should be getting at least 75% of your 100 MBPS download service, if not more.

If you are good at taking things apart and putting them back together again, you may be able to replace the card with the better Intel 8260 2 x 2 AC card.

Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260NGW 802.11a/b/g/n+ac non-vPro 2x2 WiFi + BT 4.2 combo adapter HP part number 806722-001

The card is readily available on eBay.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=806722-001&_sacat=0&_sop=15

The only thing is I am not 100% sure the card would work in your model.

But the card is relatively cheap enough to take a chance on.

Here is the service manual for your notebook's model series.

The wifi card R & R procedures can be found in chapter 6.

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c05122688

Otherwise, your suggestion to use a dual band external USB wifi adapter hopefully will provide better results than what you are getting now.

You only have to disconnect from the Intel wifi adapter and 'forget' the connection.  No need to disable it.

http://techzend.com/forget-saved-wifi-network-windows-10/