Pulling my hair out! (Wifi is jacked up)

[Fordtough68]

I could really use some help here. Here is my issue.

 

 I have an ISP DL speed of 500Mbps and upload of 20Mbps. However my laptop is like its capped at 60Mbps down.. Everything in my house works beautifully except a single laptop. A dell Inspiron 7737 with core i5. In trying to fix the issue I even went so far as to put a new wireless card in it and upgraded to the Intel AX200. Still exactly the same. So, I went ahead and upgraded my router and went with a Nighthawk AX12. I have updated BIOS, updated all drivers, made sure its in AX mode, Uninstalled and reinstalled the wireless card 10 times. Made sure I don't have Bitdefender installed. Still the same. There has to be SOMETHING I'm not seeing!! I would love to hear some ideas on where I'm going wrong! If I'm 100 feet away from the router, its 60Mbps just the same as when I'm 5 feet away from it. Even my ethernet is not going over 60Mbps. 

 

[GrockleTD]

does that laptop support above those speeds?

[Left-O-Matic]

Your Dell Inspiron 7737 is supposed to have an Intel Dual Band Wireless-N 7260, with a theoretical maximum speed of 300Mbps.  This is only when the card is set to use the 2x2 antennas running at 5Ghz.

 

Did you download the drivers from Dell or from Intel? (link to download page provided)

 

Check your SID on your wireless router to see if it's using the same name for both 2.4 & 5Ghz bands, as there's a possibility that because the 2.4 Ghz signal is usually stronger (and travels farther), the radio in your wireless NIC might be defaulting to the strongest signal.  If this is the case, there should be a setting inside your router to rename the 5Ghz to Your_router_SID_5G.  After that you can manually select which frequency band you want to connect to.

 

If it is defaulting to 2.4Ghz, and live in a crowded area (such as an apartment complex) your wireless might be fighting for RF spectrum domination.  As most Wireless routers default to channels 1, 6, or 11 everyone will be sitting on top of each other, and that will definitely slow down the connection speed. If this is the case switch your 2.4 Ghz to channel 3 or 8 and your speed will improve (each RF channel overlaps the neighboring channel).  Every once in a while one of the random channels on 5Ghz will conflict, but it doesn't last very long.

 

I'm guessing that your laptop was manufactured close to 7 years ago, so take into account that CPU strength and load can also impact your speed, as most of the TCP/IP processing stack is done by the CPU.  Also given the age, and pending the usage the radio transponders will degrade over time and it might be getting ready to quit on you.

[Fordtough68]

I appreciate the replies and ill try to answer.

 

Yes, the used to have the AC7260, but as I stated,  of has an AX200 card which supports even wifi6. I use the laptop daily and runs perfectly with absolutely zero issues other than this, so I'm doubtful that the speed internet is hurting the cpu at all. I did think their might be some kind of interference and disabled the 2.4 band on my router, but it didn't help. Im in a single family home with no direct neighbors,  but i have checked for overlap on the channels. However, all of my other devices get blazing wifi speeds anywhere in the house. With the problem existing on both wifi and ethernet, it has to be hardware or software related on the laptop itself. I even went so far as to buy what is arguably the best router on the market today, and paired it with what can be considered to be one of the best wireless cards to match. The only thing I use this laptop for is media acquisition that stores directly on my NAS, so their isn't any loads on it. I occasionally do stram AAA games through steam to it with no issues at all. 

 

Now, with regards to radio transponders, aren't they on the wireless card, or am I missing something? 

Edited October 9, 2020 by Fordtough68
Added info

[Fordtough68]

1 hour ago, GrockleTD said:

does that laptop support above those speeds?

It did in the past with no issues. 

[Fordtough68]

I wanted to provide and update on this. 

I did a clean install of windows and everything works as it should. DL speed of 500Mb and wifi6 is working properly.