Laptop having a very weak signal

steve_ · 18-05-2011 10:43pm #1

Hey guys i hope someone can help. I got a laptop a while back and i realized that the signal strength is quite weak compared to other devices. for example an iphone in my front room (router is upstairs) is getting about 40-50 % signal strength on the 802.11g draft where as my new laptop is only getting about 10% signal strength and a mere 10mbps rate. Now the laptop is running in 802.11n (2.4ghz) mode but my router is using a mix of g,b and n so i cant see why this is acting the way it is. Any ideas? Unfortunately i cant change my router over to 5ghz as i would like to because other devices can only run on 2.4ghz

bryaner · 18-05-2011 10:47pm

A cisco from upc by any chance..

steve_ · 18-05-2011 10:50pm

no a DGL-4500 by dlink

bryaner · 18-05-2011 11:00pm

Sh!tty wireless card?

steve_ · 18-05-2011 11:04pm

Possibly im not sure how i can see if thats the problem. It would be quite annoying if that was the issue

bryaner · 18-05-2011 11:13pm

steve_ wrote: »

Possibly im not sure how i can see if thats the problem. It would be quite annoying if that was the issue

Try and get a loan of a plugin one, see if its any better..

Overheal · 19-05-2011 1:26am

change the channel on the router, otherwise it's probably just a poor internal antenna. Sadly the best fix would be a USB or PCI-slot network card. I'm not that preferential to the USB ones only because they eat up a modest chunk of CPU and memory to function.

dilallio · 19-05-2011 6:43am

Check the power settings on your laptop wireless card.

Control Panel / Device Manager

Click on Network adapters, select your wireless Card, right-click and select Properties.

Depending on which wireless card you are using, there's an option in there to adjust the Transmit Power. Mine is in the Advanced Tab and is called Transmit Power.

Set it to maximum power if it's not already there.

You can also set the wireless mode a, a/b, a/b/g, a/b/g/n in there. You should try the 2nd last one. As far as I know if you have any other device which is not 802.11n connected to your n router, the router will switch back to a/b/g mode for all wireless devices connected to it.

steve_ · 08-06-2011 3:08pm

Thanks for the replies. Here the the options i found but im not sure what to change, if any. Also when im in my frontroom (downstairs) the laptop is getting 3/5 bars on signal strength but is still running very very slow

Laptop having a very weak signal

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