nighthawk A7000 was working but now has lag spikes

5 months ago, I bought a nighthawk usb adapter because the wireless adapter inside my desktop had issues. I had to do some messing around from what I've found online (disable power management, disable RunWsUSB, do the netsh wlan set autoconfig enabled trick) and eventually got it to work consistently without any ping issues. 

Fastforward to a couple days ago, I have not changed any settings or anything but every once in a while (like every 5-10 minutes) I will get huge lag spikes which go back down after a couple minutes but will persist unless I disconnect and reconnect to network which would just grant me another 5-10 minutes before I have to do it again. I've tried switching USB ports, plugging in directly to my computer vs via cradle, reinstalling drivers, rechecking that power management and RunWsUSB are disabled, but the issue is still there.

I am not sure where to start on trying to diagnose and fixing this issue - I've tried the solutions I've found on the internet of the ones I could understand but I'm not familiar with the tech behind networks/adapters/etc in general so any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!