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Forum Discussion
Solved
Extremely slow speeds with A7000 Nighthawk usb adapter
Hello:
I am having a very frustrating time getting even borderline acceptable wifi speeds with my A7000 usb adapter. I have Windows 10 Pro, fully up to date and downloaded the latest drivers f...
I'm happy to report that I have finally got things working as they should have been all along. I haven't tested the wired connection, and probably won't at this point, but I was trying to retrace my steps to avoid having to wipe the system and start with a fresh install of Windows 10. I had forgotten about one change that I had tried early on in this troubleshooting - something that was suggested on several sites if you google "slow internet windows 10" or similar. That is, disabling windows auto-tuning. I had forgotten about that, and so today I set it back to normal and just like that the 150-160 Mbps download wall was gone - I'm getting 600+ Mbps downloads using the A7000.
I think I fell into the trap of installing things too quickly from the vendors of my PC components, without being suspicious enough about what these "tools" would be doing. I honestly did not determine exactly which program was causing my horrible initial experience of sub-20 Mbps speeds. That lead me down the road of trying any and all suggestions I found that claimed to be solutions to windows 10 internet speeds, and not keeping good track of what changes I had made.
I'm not really sure why so many people feel disabled the auto-tuning function will increase speeds - i literally found 10's of pages that all said to do this, and they all seemed sure it would only help, not hurt your performance. Clearly that isn't always the case.
Hopefully this information will be useful to someone else!
Ok, I've done some more work on this and no longer believe the AC1900 has anything to do with my problem. I tried it on several other computers and made sure the driver was the latest and was able to get really nice speeds with it - up to 600 Mpbs downloads. But on the new PC that I built where I found this issue, I was still getting less than 20 Mpbs. I ended up hooking up directly to my router and had the same exact slow speeds as with wifi. I tested another PC in the same way and was able to get over 900 Mbps via ethernet.
I booted into safe mode with networking and was happy to see with the new PC I got just under 160 Mbps. Not nearly as fast as the other computer, but a huge improvement from before. So I went back to wifi, and just started deleting any programs that were just utilities or tools and things I didn't absolutely need. After doing that, and running speed tests after each one, I was able to match the 160 Mbps download speed using the A7000 via wifi.
So I'm still stumped. I'm happier than before, but I really should be getting 600-700 Mbps easily with this adapter and my network. The fact that I am hitting a wall at around 150-160 Mbps, in both wifi and ethernet, must mean there's something limiting my internet speed in Windows 10. I just can't for the life of me think what it could be. I recently had to replace the boot drive on another PC, and after a fresh install of windows 10 I just plugged in my netgear USB adapter (a much older one than the A7000) and everything worked fine. I tested that again today and was still getting about 125 Mbps download. I tested the A7000 there and immediately jumped up to about 240 Mbps. Awesome! But, why am I not getting that on my new PC???
I almost think that going with Windows 10 Pro may be the problem - there are a lot more settings in the adapter configuration and I have almost no idea what any of them mean or what they do. Is it possible that there's something defaulting to a setting that caps my network speeds?
I inspected the wifi settings and windows reports that it is a 1.3 Gbps speed. The signal strength is maxed out. It is operating in 802.11 ac mode on the 5 Ghz band. Everything that should be necessary to get maximum speed.
I've been scouring google trying to find a guide to this but everything i've tried has had no effect. I hope someone reads this that knows the answer, I would really appreciate it!
I'm happy to report that I have finally got things working as they should have been all along. I haven't tested the wired connection, and probably won't at this point, but I was trying to retrace my steps to avoid having to wipe the system and start with a fresh install of Windows 10. I had forgotten about one change that I had tried early on in this troubleshooting - something that was suggested on several sites if you google "slow internet windows 10" or similar. That is, disabling windows auto-tuning. I had forgotten about that, and so today I set it back to normal and just like that the 150-160 Mbps download wall was gone - I'm getting 600+ Mbps downloads using the A7000.
I think I fell into the trap of installing things too quickly from the vendors of my PC components, without being suspicious enough about what these "tools" would be doing. I honestly did not determine exactly which program was causing my horrible initial experience of sub-20 Mbps speeds. That lead me down the road of trying any and all suggestions I found that claimed to be solutions to windows 10 internet speeds, and not keeping good track of what changes I had made.
I'm not really sure why so many people feel disabled the auto-tuning function will increase speeds - i literally found 10's of pages that all said to do this, and they all seemed sure it would only help, not hurt your performance. Clearly that isn't always the case.
Hopefully this information will be useful to someone else!