New
#1
Is it the network or the computer?
I'm pulling what's left of my hair out.
More than a month ago I bought my first laptop. A low end model. I bought a Netgear router and easily connected the laptop wirelessly. Seemed to work fine but didn't have much time to play around as I decided to return the laptop and get a slightly better model.
The new(er) laptop also connected fine but immediately I noticed it acted different then the first. When coming out of sleep or hibernation I will get 4 bars on the network icon and after a minute or so it will go to five full bars. Now this is when the laptop is literally two feet away from the router. If I go upstairs (we have a small house) signal will drop to four or three bars. Also noticed I can't "see" other networks (neighbors I assume) as well as I used to on the other laptop.
And finally when I check status of the Wireless Adapter on the laptop it shows connection speed of 65 Mbps. Never better and certainly worse when the signal gets weaker.
I uninstalled/reinstalled the wireless adapter (I hate to do such things on a brand new computer) and also redownloaded the drivers. No changes.
So is it the laptops wireless connection that is bad? The reason I lean to this is because it gets a weak signal/can't see other networks that didn't seem to happen with the original laptop.
Or is it a bad router? The reason I lean to this is because I enabled the wireless on my desktop to check its performance and it being an inch away from the router only had a connection speed of 72Mbps.
Should I try a different router to rule that out? Return the computer and chalk it up to a bad wireless car/kinked antenna etc.? Thanks