$20 Fix For Ongoing WiFi Issue

[gdr_11]

After two years of dealing with the poor wifi signal on my Dell PC I finally gave up and bought a USB adapter with external antenna. My house has only one cable connection at one end of the house where my internet router and modem are at while my office is at the other end of the house with my Dell PC having an anemic internal wifi card. My iphone, Kindle Fire and Dell laptop all work fine in the office but the best I have ever been able to get out of my desktop was 72mbps and erratic speed for loading up web sites.

I tried moving the computer, elevating the modem and making all kinds of system adjustments but finally caved in an bought one of these for $20 from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07G7ZM3ZS/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Immediately my speed went from 72mbps to a range of 520mbps up to 900mbps. Needless to say, my slow web page loads are now history. Only minor issue is that the Dell still wants to try the internal card first even though I have disabled it so when I start up after a period of non use it takes 1-2 minutes before the PC connects the dongle and I am off.

Since I know many folks have similar issues I thought I would share my fix

[67Cuda]

Can you disable the internal WiFi through the bios?

[the86d]

It shouldn't auto re-enable...
Are you disabling in device manager (assuming Windows)?

Maybe replace the drivers with the wrong ones so it just fails to work?

[westcoaster]

Thanks OP! I have co workers with this issue..

[Dragunov]

Can you disable the internal WiFi through the bios?

You can disable it by opening the little service bay cover on the bottom of your laptop, and physically removing the WiFi card.

[therealnickb]

You can disable it by opening the little service bay cover on the bottom of your laptop, and physically removing the WiFi card.

Doh!

[Skip_Dog]

Adding usp extension cable would be nice. If you ever move the tower you do not have to worry about breaking the antennas. And you can get a better line to the router.

[Deedle]

This is how you fix that.

[high_revs]

This is how you fix that.

yep.. nothing beats this.

then again, i had similar issues but mine was worse (see my threads here). once I bought a new router, things sped much so much more. but i never got to 520 though.

i did change my wifi nic in my laptop to 802.11ac but that only marginally made it better with the asus rt-n56u.

[C.G.]

You can disable it by opening the little service bay cover on the bottom of your laptop, and physically removing the WiFi card.

Why go inside when it can be turned off in Wi-fi settings.