Wifi Issues on my Laptop

[Darren]

In my flurry of troubleshooting yesterday I did several things all at once including removing uTorrent, reseting Firewall defaults, and a few other things. I also ran the following commands in command prompt as admin.

ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /registerdns
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
netsh winsock reset

After a reboot it worked fine. For a day. Today it was doing it all over again. I've noticed that when the problem is occurring the the usage graph under the performance tab in Task Manager has very random spikes from 0 to varying values, usually under 100kbps, and never above 1mbps. I ran only the commands above again today and it fixed it again after a reboot. Now the usage graph is normal and consistently has a signal and of way higher speeds.

What do these commands accomplish and any idea what might be the root issue? I expect I'll have to do this every time I have a problem, so guess I need to learn batch files.

 

[beers]

Do you see the adapter sync at a lower negotiation in Status when this happens?

 

[Darren]

I presume you're talking about the speed listed under WiFi Status in terms of mbps? I haven't actually paid much attention to that speed, but I will if it changes. It currently is sitting at 54mbps and the WiFi still seems to be cooperating, for now.

Apparently the router/modem we have is limited to only B and G signal, not even N. How pathetic. Not that it should matter since our speed package would barely saturate the B signal at 11mbps. But still, that's just sad.

 

[beers]

Hm, what specific device model is it?

I'd probably ask for a newer one if leased, b/g only are usually pretty dated with limited hardware/capacity. I've seen a lot of units crap the bed after torrenting for a brief period (or even heavy web browsing) as they don't have enough resources to maintain all of the session states.

 

[Okedokey]

I would look into interference and noise. I had to put a 6db attenuator on my cable network for the same reason (supplied by ISP). Also check the channel and any surrounding crossover. Change the channel if necessary.

 

[Darren]

Interference or noise doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me because it's only on my laptop, and even different wireless adapters on the machine have the same problem. It had a built in channel search and it landed on the same one it had been on before. As far as looking for interference or noise, I wouldn't even know where to start.

The issues with my laptop have been happening for almost as long as I can remember having the laptop (got it in April 2014) while the rest of the network has been fine until recently. According to my brother, who lives here, it's been giving him trouble for the past month or so. Since I came back this weekend my laptop is worse than it ever has been before and is pretty much unusuable. Was fully functioning for a bulk of the summer and 3 weeks ago though...

Interestingly, my old USB adapter that had previously quit working and was replaced now works fine on my desktop. Friend with identical laptop was here last night for several hours and didn't report the same problems I've been having outside of lag spikes that were network wide.

This is the manual for the model
https://www.att.com/support_media/images/pdf/uverse/iNIDv2_UG.pdf

I torrent rarely, and never anything of significant volume. Could be the problem, but I'd be surprised. Uninstalling uTorrent didn't have an effect either.

 

[Okedokey]

Run this and seem what interference there may be.

http://www.inssider.com/

 

[beers]

There's also 'Wifi Analyzer' that you can install on your phone, they both give you visual graphs of Wifi traffic around you.