Nighthawk AC1900 USB Adapter Connection is Unstable
I purchased the Nighthawk AC1900 USB Adapter in May of 2020 for my new computer build. I haven't really had many problems with it except one where it would disconnect itself (fixed). But a new problem has come about. The connection is unstable. According to Speedtest.net, I am getting spikes in my download speed and sometimes my upload speed. This really effects my video games because if you lose connection for the smallest second, it will screw you over. It also sometimes happens every 10 seconds. Does anyone have a solution?
Model: A7000|Nighthawk AC1900 WiFi USB Adapter - USB 3.0
I've been testing many different WiFi adapters on different PCs for months now on quite difficult setting and A7000 adapter was one of them. I bought it like week ago. So, long story short, A7000 is completely broken currently on Win10 if you want to get reliable connection (yes, connection, not even speed) above 100Mbps. I tested every single setting/fix you could find on internet, related to power settings, BIOS, chipsets, services disabling, USB drivers, switching and whatever. What I see is that even my tiny TP-LINK Archer T2U gets much better stability (and average speed actually due to that) than A7000, even though it have only tiny internal antenna. I have got 300/300Mbps internet and it can easily be achieved by "proper wifi adapters" like PCIe based ones. In case of T2U I get stable 240Mbps for hours without latency issues in the same time, while A7000 is only able to peak to 300Mbps for 2-3seconds, after which link strength drops to minimal as seen from Windows/Genie UIs (other WiFi devices in house, that use the same network do not have issues at this exact moment, so this is definitely not router issue), ping dies, then it have to recover for 20-30 seconds, doing some resets in the meantime, after which it agains very quickly peaks to 300Mbps, and then it go down again. So you have like 80-90% of downtime using A7000 in practice, this is why T2U on average is much faster even though it can peak to only 240Mbps. Issue does not seem to be visible when you use QoS or download manager settings to not exceed 100Mbps, interestingly enough - if you don't download anything intensively, then connection is very stable and can fool you that it will remain such after starting to download. This could be A7000 overheating or very old driver issue, I don't know.
Netgear seems to have abandoned USB adapters development and support, like most companies did from what I see.
So sad info to you: you just wasted your money (like I did) to buy this adapter, most internet guides saying it is best adapter are probably just copying the same reviews for years without actually testing it on modern setups. If you want proper connection for high-speed and low latency internet - do not use USB adapters at all, for some reason this is abandoned technology in that regime.
My recommendation: stop wasting time trying to debug this product (as this is not your responsibility anyway), refund if possible, grab something that is PCIe based and have antenna cable extenders and ideally that supports WiFi 6 (even if you don't want to use ax, just because those are products that are going to be actively supported now), like TX3000E (edit: PCIe adapters are much much cheaper than USB ones anyway).
