Wifi adapter stops "working hard" once it gets connected to my network

danprince10

Commendable
Mar 3, 2016
3
0
1,510
Okay so I am a poker player in NJ. The way online poker works here (we have our own legal sites to play on for NJ only) is it has to do geolocation to ensure you are physically in NJ. It does this by triangulating your position using 3 nearby routers, your own and 2 other ones. Here is my issue, my list of available connection fluctuates between 4 and usually 2 (mine and my direct neighbors ), occasionally dropping down to only showing my own home router connection. My phone wifi shows like 10 available connections. And my laptop sitting in the exact same spot as my desktop also shows like 10 connections available.

Sometimes I can fix this by either disconnecting from my home router and waiting for a few minutes and then all the connections will appear and then I connect to my home router again and it will be fine for a little while until some or all of the other 3 connections (mine shows as 4 bars direct neighbor as 3, the other 2 will show as just 2 bars ) dissapear from my available connections list. It's like once it sees that I'm connected to a good connection and am online okay, it just shrugs off and stops even bothering to try to see those other connections because why would I need them. it doesn't even drop them down to 1 bar or anything they just disappear entirely! Is this a setting I can turn off or on somewhere? I have no idea why my desktop sees so few available connections when I have a wifi card with these 2 antennas sticking out of while my laptop which has nothing of the sort sees 10+ from the same or an even worse location.

Does anyone know any way to boost the range of my wireless adapter or do anything that may help my situation?
 

danprince10

Commendable
Mar 3, 2016
3
0
1,510
Lol thought I had fixed it. Disconnected from my home wifi. Adjusted the antennas by loosening how tightly I had screwed them into the wireless card. My computer jumps up to 6(!!!) available connections. Reconnect to my home router. 5 Minutes later back to just 2 connections showing.... *sigh*

And the weird thing is it never loses one at a time they always all just dissapear at once. There definitely has to be some setting with my wifi card going into some sort of "snooze"/low range/low output mode once it gets connected.

Also since I forgot to include this, my pci wifi card is a Realtek RTL8192CE