Windows 10 Slow Network Speeds over Ethernet & WI-FI - Both Local & External

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A. User

Recently my network speeds over both Ethernet and WI-FI have dropped significantly causing me to have issues while working from home during COVID.


I have quite an old Dell XPS L702X running windows 10. However, this laptop has been a beast, lasting me more than 10 years and still performing surprisingly well. As such, I would really hate to have to spend money on a new machine.


Additionally I have a what I believe is an Arris XB6 router which is switch to gateway mode and connected to a Linksys Velop Mesh Router system. My laptop which is having issues


I live in Canada and my ISP provides me with Gigabit speeds, which on my other devices connected via ethernet can achieve. With regards to WI-FI, I can hit speeds of 450+ on my cell phone using the Ookla Speedtest App.


The laptop which is having issues Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6230 wireless card, and would give me speeds of 150 Mbps on average over the 5ghz band. However suddenly after a recent update to windows, or a driver or something, my laptop dropped to giving me 70Mbps over the 5Ghz band and barely hits 40Mbps on the 2.4ghz band.


I thought it was something to do with the drivers, or device properties so I tried playing with the values there. I searched far and wide on the net for clues and read countless MS Community pages to no avail. Finally I chalked it up to the wifi card being bad. So I picked up an Intel 7260 Wireless-AC card. This brought my speeds back up to 150Mbps on the 5Ghz band, however with wireless AC I would expect at least double that.


So finally I decided it was nothing to do with wifi, so tested my wired speeds (wish i had done so sooner) and low and behold i was only getting 170 Mbps over a wired connection. I then decided to take the internet out of the equation and tested over local network using iperf between the laptop and my NAS and once again barely went above 170.


I'm at my wits end with this issue. It seems something within the operating system is halting my machine from achieving the speeds it should be capable of.

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