Awful wifi connection speed

OneSpartan · 6 Aug 2018 at 16:20

Hi,
My system came with a:
PCE-N15 300MBPS 802.11B/G/N WIRELESS PCI-E NETWORK ADAPTER
I have been having really slow connection speeds so just had a new router installed by Virgin Media.
My PC sits beside an apple iMac. The speed of the iMac has more than doubled but I'm only getting 1Mb/s from my Overclockers PC.
Is there anything i can try to get my card to speed up or is it worth upgrading? The driver is up to date..
Thanks,
Mike

bremen1874 · 6 Aug 2018 at 16:31

Is the signal getting blocked by the PC case?
Are the antennas attached (sounds stupid but it cropped on here recently)?
Are you using drivers downloaded from Asus?
Have you tried booting into 'safe mode with networking'?

The adapter you have is never going to fast, but it should be better than what you're seeing.

pcfarrar · 6 Aug 2018 at 17:39

On the iMac if you option click the WiFi icon what are the stats? It would be handy to know what the signal strength is.

Then compare with the PC.

Rainmaker · 6 Aug 2018 at 20:34

Let's not get too ahead of ourselves before we check the basics. Your card is a 300Mbs wireless N card, which is very low speed (about half that if you're lucky in the real world). The iMac is likely wireless AC (as is your new router/hub from VM). A decent AC card is going to be capable of around 5 times the speed of your old N card. That's going to account for the difference straight away.

You need a quality wireless AC card to see anything like good throughput, for starters. They're not expensive. Also VM are lazy and the wifi settings default to 20MHz channel widths. Log into the SH3 and change it to 80MHz (or at least 40MHz) and apply. Then connect and see the difference (on your iMac, and your PC when it has a proper wifi card installed - it won't magically fix a hardware limitation on your 300Mbps card).

Top lurking, btw.