slow wifi on moms laptop

[Millhaws]

My mom has been experiencing very slow download speeds on her laptop. We have a fairly good 500mbps down plan and all the other devices in the house seem to be working fine but on her laptop, she is struggling to get more than 4mbps down even when sitting right in front of the router. For comparison my laptop gets 226mbps from the same location. Her laptop is an HP 15 model db0051od with a 802.11b/g/n (1x1) wi-fi® and bluetooth® 4.2 combo card for the networking card. My question is a). can this card be replaced in this laptop and b). would it make any difference to do so or is there something else I can do to fix her problem. We are planning on getting a powerline adapter for at home so she can run it wired at least for the time being but that wont help her when she is out and about. Any help would be appreciated! Thank you! 

[Kazooduck]

Ethernet is definitely the choice when she’s stationary, I’ll leave someone else to the network card question tho.

[OddOod]

You can definitely try a new wifi card like this one from ebay, but I'd first do some sleuthing. At the very least try grabbing a fresh copy of the driver from the HP website, wiping the old driver, installing the new one. If that doesn't help, make sure that it's actually the wifi card by doing a network transfer and ideally try it on a different network. Finally, pop the back open and check that the car is actually connected to the antennas

[LWM723]

Try a USB wifi dongle.

[Millhaws]

Small update: I ended up resetting her network all together and that seemed to help a little. from that same location next to the router, she is now able to get speeds in the 40mbps range but that's still far from where it should be. the antenna are connected and the drivers have been reinstalled.

[LWM723]

Try a free software called TCPOptimizer and set it to optimal.

[Alex Atkin UK]

4 hours ago, Millhaws said:

Small update: I ended up resetting her network all together and that seemed to help a little. from that same location next to the router, she is now able to get speeds in the 40mbps range but that's still far from where it should be. the antenna are connected and the drivers have been reinstalled.

Getting 40Mbit on a single-stream 802.11n card that is probably only 2.4Ghz is actually pretty good.  You're unlikely to do any better without swapping the WiFi card and I believe HP whitelist cards so I have no idea which, if any, better cards would work.

 

3 hours ago, LWM723 said:

Try a free software called TCPOptimizer and set it to optimal.

DO NOT DO THIS!  Windows defaults are fine, don't mess with the TCP/IP stack as you're hitting the limit of the WiFi card not the networking stack.

This software used to be useful in days gone, but I do not believe its necessary any more and more likely to mess something up, though it does at least (in theory) have a reset to default option.