Our wifi adaptors were doing fine until one day they became totally slow in windows 7 due to the latest and greatest driver updated automatically. We didn’t know what happened until we realised the updated driver actually caused it to connect at 54Mbs instead of N-300Mbs. So, we ran the speed test with rolled back driver and sure enough, the connection is greatly improved. How much improvement vs the new updated driver? We used the speedtest to check the connections.
And the updated driver that we don’t need, so turn off the automatic update drivers function.
Roll back driver to the fast one, right click on wireless network connection/wireless adaptor and select properties/ configuration
Click roll back if there is a driver that works better before this
and the speed test
We just wanted to make sure it’s the driver, we updated the driver again to see if the speed test followed, and it did, amazing
And the new one is found and installed
and slower again
While we’re here, we would like to update how to set up wireless network for our home, the best possible way.
We have 4 rooms upstairs and comcast cable internet, we select the room next to the master bedroom for our wireless router N300 Airlink101 AR680W which we bought 3 years ago, it’s still solid and great until now.
Well, the setup is pretty normal for any router I’m sure, but let’s do Airlink101 AR680W. If we reset the router, there is a little button that needs to pushed and held for a few seconds, then we can use any pc windows browsers to access the router. The default “admin” will come up and the password should be “admin” also.
We will get to a basic network setup
Click the wireless tap, this is where we set up our important stuff for the wifi, we need a ssid = call it any name, this is the name that all our wireless adaptors will have to login to. We don’t broadcast our ssid, the least we expose the better. Sometimes, you can see tons of ssids popup on your wireless area, these are the ssids that have broadcast ssid turned on.
Next tap is the network security, we use both WPA-PSK/WPA2-PSK for newer adaptors. Passphrase is needed for all adaptors to login.
We also use mac address filtering for extra security, every laptop, wifi adaptor should have a unique mac address built-in.
If we want to find down which mac address we have on our wifi adaptors or our laptop wifi adaptor, just go to Start-type in cmd and we will have a dosprompt window (black), just type in ipconfig /all
Just copy this mac address and add to the list of mac address permitted in the router security section. With this mac address filter, even if a person knows the SSID and the passcode, he/she can’t go through the internet since the mac address is not in the list.
The next one we use is the firewall built in the router-We turned on the block WAN ping (stop people from pinging our ip) and SPI mode.
For those who work at home and need VPN to connect to company’s server, we need to turn VPN pass through options.
Up to here, everything should be working very well and pretty safely, we don’t touch all the other options that the router offers.
For one of our computer that’s still running windows XP, we need to connect it to our router. First, make sure the driver is installed and ready to use, with windowxp, we use the driver that comes with the card.
click use windows to configure my wireless network settings and add the SSID of the network we want to connect to
Click OK and we should see the wireless is connected providing the mac address of this computer is in the list of the mac address filter.
Always have speed test to make sure it does have the best driver installed.
Cheers,