How To Wireless ping-spike Fix for Windows 10

[Kaido]

Upgraded to 2004 & started getting weird Internet lag. Ran a continuous pingtest & was getting super high response times every few seconds. Messed around with it, figured the slim USB wi-fi stick on my desktop tower was overheating & dying, so I ordered a replacement (with an antenna on it, whoo!), but got the same results. Turns out out this is a bit of a known issue, if you know the right keywords:

Permanent fix for WIFI Ping Spikes

I recently moved so I was forced to switch from LAN to WIFI. In my mind I thought, it would be only slightly worse but I was wrong. I couldn't play any multiplayer game because the lags and

answers.microsoft.com

Basically, the computer scans for nearby WAP's & spikes the ping. You can change the WLAN Autoconfig service to manual, but it will eventually reset back to automatic, so the solution is to either enter a command-line command or use a third-party babysitting app. More discussion here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/3ahg59

To apply the fix, open an elevated command prompt & paste this in: (replace YourWifiCardName with the interface name of your card from the network interface list in control panel's network adapter section, and keep the quotes)

netsh wlan set autoconfig enabled=no interface="YourWifiCardName"

No reboot required, started working right away! There's also a little free utility available here:

Home

Software, Download, WLAN Optimizer, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10

www.martin-majowski.de

I've never run into this issue before. I was trying to figure out if it was my hardware, router, firmware, software, updates, etc. Very odd little problem. It wasn't the wi-fi hardware, as I bought a different chipset. The issue seems to have been around for awhile (5+ years at least, from what I saw while googling). I was trying to figure out if it was a problem with the USB drivers or something & was about ready to order like a PCIe Wi-Fi card to resolve it, and finally came across the autoconfig-disable trick above. Whoohoo!

 

[VirtualLarry]

Hmm. Veeeeery iiiinteresting.


I wonder if some of this issue isn't what my now-not-quite-my-friend was going on about, about the PC I built him for "low-end gaming" (Minecraft, Roblox, and eventually, Fortnite) was experiencing. He claimed that it was "stuttering" when playing games. He had it on wireless, even though his router was in the same room, had a spare ethernet port on it, and I gave him a free ethernet cable. I BEGGED him to test it out wired, just to see if the "stuttering" would go away, but he couldn't be bothered.

The specs of the PC, were a G4560 (3.5Ghz Kaby Lake dual-core with HT / 2C/4T, basically an i3 in all but name), and a Radeon R7 260X 2GB GDDR5, which is roughly the performance of an RX 560, well, almost. Same number of stream processors, although GCN 1.1 rather than Polaris. System had 8GB of DDR4, and an SSD.

So it should have at least hit the minimum specs for those games, if not the recommended ones.

I suspected a networking problem, but he never wanted to test it (A/B testing) to see if it fixed it. None of my friends ever seem to want to actually co-operate in doing tech-support, well, except for a couple of late friends, and one current friend that I rarely talk to.

 

[Kaido]

Hmm. Veeeeery iiiinteresting.


I wonder if some of this issue isn't what my now-not-quite-my-friend was going on about, about the PC I built him for "low-end gaming" (Minecraft, Roblox, and eventually, Fortnite) was experiencing. He claimed that it was "stuttering" when playing games. He had it on wireless, even though his router was in the same room, had a spare ethernet port on it, and I gave him a free ethernet cable. I BEGGED him to test it out wired, just to see if the "stuttering" would go away, but he couldn't be bothered.

The specs of the PC, were a G4560 (3.5Ghz Kaby Lake dual-core with HT / 2C/4T, basically an i3 in all but name), and a Radeon R7 260X 2GB GDDR5, which is roughly the performance of an RX 560, well, almost. Same number of stream processors, although GCN 1.1 rather than Polaris. System had 8GB of DDR4, and an SSD.

So it should have at least hit the minimum specs for those games, if not the recommended ones.

I suspected a networking problem, but he never wanted to test it (A/B testing) to see if it fixed it. None of my friends ever seem to want to actually co-operate in doing tech-support, well, except for a couple of late friends, and one current friend that I rarely talk to.

Yup, just open CMD & do a ping -t 8.8.8.8 and let it run for awhile. For me, like every 8 or so pings would go from say 50ms to 2,000ms. I goofed with it for a day or two & then said screw it & ordered a new wireless antenna, as mine was pretty old anyway & the faster would boosted my speed 2x.

Even Internet surfing would stutter...pages would hang just a wee bit, typing would lock up for a split second, occasionally I'd get a very quick flash of 'page couldn't be loaded' & then it'd load, just really random weird stuff. I had done a fresh OS install not too long ago, updated the drivers, etc. & nothing tested out bad.

I've never run into this particular issue before. It seems to have been around for a long time. I tried two different wireless radios, plus the two different USB bridges in my desktop machine, no love. I figured I'd shell out for a PCIe Wifi card, and if that didn't do the trick, do a full OS reinstall. Turned out it's just a dumb little glitch that only happens sometimes. A quick google search shows evidence going back as far as 2014:

How to fix ur wifi ping spikes

so imma gamer and i was getting ping spikes every 3-5 seconds witch tottaly ruined my gameplay ,so i did some research and found a fix, basicly you gotta stop ur wifi from looking for other networks while ur connected to one, so ur gunna wanna open up cmd prompt and run netsh wlan show settings, ...

linustechtips.com

Why now, on Windows 10, with different wireless radio chipsets & different USB bridges? I dunno. But the fix worked! Tucking this away in my 'weird IT problems' list lol.