PCI card and USB

needhelp1228

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Aug 12, 2013
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10,510
Hi all,
I'm new here and not very techie so please bear with me.

This is complicated (at least it is for me)

Have an old XP PC (works great) which I gave to my brother as his was no good, it worked fine for about 5 weeks .
This PC was in a bedroom in my house and had a PCI card (Ralink I think).
Brother has Talk Talk via a phone line and it has been OK, slowish but he was happy with it, recently it started losing the internet connection up to 5/6 time a day sometimes he could not get it back on for up to 3 hours (he was repeatedly rebooting it) He has a Dlink router and a wireless adaptor stood next to the PC as it is in an upstairs room

Talk Talk now say there is a fault on the line and he awaits a engineer
I wanted to ask will the PCI card and the Dlink wireless adaptor work together or should the PCI card be disabled.
 
Solution
You can actually use both if you work at it hard enough. By default windows will always prefer to use the wired connection to the adapter before it will use the wireless. It is pretty stupid as long as it gets a signal on the ethernet cable even if data does not pass it will not use the PCI wireless card.

It is possible by changing the network settings to over ride this behavior. You can also disable the PCI network settings if you like but if it has not caused trouble before I would leave it alone.
You can actually use both if you work at it hard enough. By default windows will always prefer to use the wired connection to the adapter before it will use the wireless. It is pretty stupid as long as it gets a signal on the ethernet cable even if data does not pass it will not use the PCI wireless card.

It is possible by changing the network settings to over ride this behavior. You can also disable the PCI network settings if you like but if it has not caused trouble before I would leave it alone.
 
Solution