Help Me! Wifi Connection Problems

[Renegade]

So, tons and tons of technological problems at my place and it seems like the internet's solutions don't do anything to help. First off, thanks to everyone for offering advice over and over again.

Anyways, my internet. For some reason, my internet connectivity drops like dead flies at random intervals. No, it is not my laptop. I made sure of this when I took my laptop to my friend's house and it worked perfectly fine. Didn't drop the internet at all throughout the day. On top of that, my PS4, my phone, every other piece of technology in my place doesn't drop connectivity. But sometimes, I get unexplained lag on my PS4. It's something with the internet router and I'm not sure how to fix it because I've messed with the settings on my laptop, I've called the company, nothing has changed. So, I'm not sure what to do besides get a new router. I'm about 90% sure it's not my laptop because I tested it at my friend's.

 

[Kael]

There could be a varying degree of issues within this.

I'd start with the most obvious and assume it's a miner. What is a miner you may ask? Well a miner (bitcoin miner, bandwidth miner, CPU miner) are malicious programs whose sole intent is to steal your resources for personal gain. It will drastically slow down your network and CPU. Have you downloaded any sketchy programs lately? Either way i'd suggest you download a program called Roguekiller. This program will seek out any malicious programs within your system and remove them. It can even remove rootkits. After you use that, i'd suggest downloading Malwarebytes and use the free month sub and run an intensive scan on your system.

Are you using wifi? Another issue may be a device nearby is conflicting with the frequency used by your network. A simple frequency change will solve that issue.

Make sure your network drivers are up to date.

If you're using an external network interface, make sure your I/O drivers are properly updated.

You can also try flushing your TCP/IP stack. This can remove unwanted data being consistently transmitted through your router.

a. Press Windows +X.

b. Click Command prompt (Admin mode)

c. Type ‘netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt’

d. Press Enter.

e. Reboot the computer


However, seeing that it's only affecting your laptop, i'm almost certain some form of malicious software is hogging your network resources and has binded itself to your network to prevent detection on other networks.

Your router may be infected by a new form of malware that was recently discovered last year. If this is the case, you're better off buying a new router and fully flushing your network before doing anything as it's very difficult to remove this form of malware from routers.



Source: Eight Years as a Computer Security and Malware Analyst.

 

[chuckwagon]

I would start with finding out the manufacturer of your wireless adapter and then going to their website to download the latest driver. If you don't know the manufacturer, check in "Device Manager" you can expand the network drivers and it will show you.

My theory is that you have slightly outdated drivers, (or Windows tried to update your drivers and corrupted them). Like you said, it worked perfectly at your friend's house. Your friend's router may be using different bands (A, B, G, N, etc) than your home wireless.

Other steps you can try are to update your router's firmware, try changing you wireless networks channel. (I think channel 6 is the default). If you use a wireless mouse, etc. try unplugging to see if there is interference there.

One last thing- sometimes laptop or network adapters will install network managers that will try to manage networks. I have seen this with Lenovo computers and Intel wireless adapters. In my opinion Windows does a fine job of managing the networks, and when it messes up, it is easy enough to fix. I have seen wth the third party software, things get crossed up with Windows and causes problems. If you have anything like this I would suggesting uninstalling it.

Hope that helps.