Do I need a better wireless card?

[Pl8]

Hi there!

I've had my PC Specialist computer for a while now and it's just perfect, except for the wireless element. When I'm home alone my wifi works nice and quickly, but as soon as my flatmate switches his computer on the speed of mine just plummets - for example a game patch I tried to download yesterday said was estimating 3 hours download time; I gave up and tried again today and it took 4 minutes.

He swears he isn't torrenting but he says his computer doesn't slow down at all when I'm home, so my only other hope is that my wireless card isn't up to snuff. It's the basic one - WIRELESS 802.11N 300Mbps PCI CARD - and I'd be very grateful for advice as to whether I could replace this with another card in order for my computer to be able to muscle in when my flatmate is home, or if there's anything else that could be causing this problem? Antennae tinkering has had no effect.

Thanks!

 

[Rakk]

Given the connection is perfectly fine when your housemate isn't using the broadband, I don't think a change of wireless card would make a difference.

It almost sounds like your flatmates PC is getting priority over the bandwidth, I've no idea what would cause this or whether this can be changed though.

 

[Pl8]

Given the connection is perfectly fine when your housemate isn't using the broadband, I don't think a change of wireless card would make a difference.

It almost sounds like your flatmates PC is getting priority over the bandwidth, I've no idea what would cause this or whether this can be changed though.

Thank you, this was my fear. Because he insists he isn't doing anything to hog bandwidth and there's nothing I can do to affect his access as far as I am aware, I was hoping that it could be that his card is more powerful than mine which is why he's getting priority (can you tell I don't know much about computers?!). Wishful thinking

 

[Rakk]

Well, I could be wrong - I'm certainly no specialist in such things (in fact I don't even have wireless on my PC), so I'd see if anyone has any thoughts about it before trusting me

 

[BlessedSquirrel]

It does sound like he has a torrent program running. Even if he's not downloading but has active torrents sharing in the background, the way torrents programs work, that would clog your Internet. Make sure he's disabled run on startup and then have a look at speeds.

 

[Pl8]

It does sound like he has a torrent program running. Even if he's not downloading but has active torrents sharing in the background, the way torrents programs work, that would clog your Internet. Make sure he's disabled run on startup and then have a look at speeds.

Thanks, I'm pretty sure he does have a torrent program but he won't admit it and I've asked so many times I can't really keep asking, and I'm guessing he's got a password on his computer so I can't have a look while he's out

It's so frustrating that I can't do anything because he won't admit what's going on! The QoS settings on our crappy talktalk router make no sense to me so I was hoping that I could outgun him in terms of hardware (good wireless card) but that doesn't seem to be the case.

 

[BlessedSquirrel]

Decent router that you have more control over sounds like the way forward. Would highly recommend the slew of new Asus ones, just bough one myself and they are fantastic. You could have him on the 2.5 channel and use the 5ghz channel for your own devices. That's what I do at home with my flatmate, allocating half the broadband bandwidth to each channel.