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PCs & Mobiles Forum - Do wifi dongles wear out? - Page 1
Elite Donator
Since buying the Wii, our router has been in the living room, so I've had to connect a USB wifi dongle to the PC to connect to it from my office upstairs.
When I first bought a dongle, it worked brilliantly, with a full-strength signal all the time, but after a year or two, it was always going down to low strength and got slower and slower. I could speed it up a bit by pulling it out of the USB socket and rebooting it. But eventually even that didn't help.
In the end, I bought a replacement, and again it worked brilliantly with a full strength signal for a year or more, even though the old one could only get a low signal.
Well, now, this dongle is also failing to ever get a good signal. Right now it says "Low 11mbps" but sometimes it's even "Very low 5.5 mbps", which seems slower than bloody dial up!
Does anyone know if they actually wear out? I think I've got to buy another one, but I don't understand why it keeps happening.
Thanks.
This item was edited on Thursday, 9th September 2010, 10:57
Super Admin
Over time components can wear and effect performance, but a year seems very short to me.
It could be interference from other appliances, maybe try changing the channel your router uses.
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Elite
I had a similar issue with PCMCIA WiFi cards going back about 6 years ago.
Depends o the manufacturor in the end, I wouldn't expect minuture no name brands from e-Bay @£2.00 each to last past a year. I keep some for quick & emergancy fault finding (guest machines) as the MAC addresses are already in the router.
I consider myself an optimist, albeit an optimist with cynical tendencies and a dark side that Lucifer himself would find a little creepy. (Perhaps you’ve noticed.) You don’t normally associate cynicism with an upbeat pov. But I have exactly that combination and will defend it.
Never has so little had to be explained by me to so many so often.
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This item was edited on Thursday, 9th September 2010, 13:41
Elite Donator
Well, they have been 3Com and Netgear respectively, so not really cheapies, I wouldn't have though.
As an experiment, I have ordered a PCI wifi card, which if I am to believe the blurb, is much faster and more powerful than a dongle. We'll see.
