Maddening wireless problem  

I have this very odd wireless issue which I am scratching my head about.

I have just set up three brand new (Windows 10) laptops in a big room, 40 ft by 20 ft approximately. All the laptops are identical, high end models. The router (a BT hub) provides high speed fibre broadband and is in the middle of the room near the wall.

Two of the laptops work perfectly wirelessly, the other won't. It drops the connection, or takes ages to load web pages. BUT, it is perfect on ethernet, and, even more mysteriously, is fine on wireless when I take it out of that environment and hook up to a different network. Interestingly this misbehaving one was set up and is situated very close to the router/hub, but switching the laptops around to different parts of the room seems to make little difference.

This odd wireless behaviour appeared very soon after setup, on different browsers, before I installed antivirus on it too. I even set up Windows 10 again from scratch on it but to no avail.

I cannot make any sense out of this at all!

It almost sounds like a hardware problem - like maybe the antenna is not seated properly on the module.

I would curious to see what the signal strength and connection speed look like.

Goto Start > Settings > Network & Internet > Status > Change adapter options. Right-click on your WiFi adapter and choose "status". What do the Speed and Signal quality look like?

hsehestedt said:

It almost sounds like a hardware problem - like maybe the antenna is not seated properly on the module.

I would curious to see what the signal strength and connection speed look like.

Goto Start > Settings > Network & Internet > Status > Change adapter options. Right-click on your WiFi adapter and choose "status". What do the Speed and Signal quality look like?

Thank you for that. I will not be in there until tomorrow but that's the first think I'll check. Perhaps I should compare this speed here on all three of them and see if there's a difference.

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f14tomcat said:

If they are all on the same freq. channel, i.e. all on 2.4 or 5.0, try moving the bad boy to the other. Might be getting collisions.

That's interesting, I wasn't aware you could allocate different channels to different attached devices.

Well I found the answer, and it was as simple as the Intel Wireless adapter driver being just slightly out of date (despite Windows and HP telling me it was up to date.

Brand new driver installed and it's working perfectly, surprised a recently superseded driver could cause so many problems.