New wireless adapter frequently cutting out

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Adrenal

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Dec 24, 2013
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10,510
Hi! So I forgot to bring any of my networking stuff home with me for Christmas and I bought a wireless adapter for £15 or so to last me a couple of weeks.

The adapter is a TP-Link TL-WN727N. It started out working fine. After a day, I started getting occasional "disconnects" in games, lasting a few seconds but enough to boot me out of whatever game I was in (or force a reconnect, depending on what game I was playing). Skype conversations and Spotify, however, would keep going fine through these spikes and my PC maintained it had a connection.

I'm on the third day with this adapter now and the problem has got worse and worse. Last night it was happening every few minutes, today it's happening every thirty seconds or so. There appears to be no relation to peak times or activity in the house, it's simply been a linear progression downwards over the last few days. I'm now incapable of even queueing for a matchmade game without it bugging.

I've found several people with the same problem as me via Google but no solutions so far.

If you need any technical info, please let me know - and (in non-obvious cases) explain how to get it! I'm new around here and pretty bad when it comes to anything technical.
 
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noidea_77

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Jul 28, 2012
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Why don't you tell us a bit more about the exact situation? Is it your own router or a shared one? Do other devices work on this router? How is your signal strength? Do you have other strong wifi lans around? Can you change the channels in the router?
 
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Adrenal

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Dec 24, 2013
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10,510


Sure! So it's a shared router, I'm with my family at the moment. There's a bunch of devices on the router: three laptops and my desktop. None of the laptops are having problems and it doesn't seem to be related to heavy loads because it's happening at all times of day. Signal strength is unavoidably low due to the constraints of the house and where my desktop is. It's pretty stable at 35-40% - this was never a problem with my old wireless adapter, though.

There's a couple of other wifi lans around but all of a weaker signal. It's conceivable they may be interfering but unlikely - my brother in the next room has similar signal strengths to nearby wifis and no such problems. On the recommendation of a friend I tried changing channels on the router (we tried 6 and 11) but neither of these had any impact.
 
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noidea_77

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Jul 28, 2012
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The stick has a build-in antenna and the direction it is pointing to is essential for the connection stability. Do you have the extension cable, that cam with the stick? Use that and change the position of the stick. until you get the best signal.
 
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Adrenal

Honorable
Dec 24, 2013
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10,510


Yeah, I've been using the extension cable since day one (without it the signal strength would be too low). It's already in the best position. Since you mentioned direction I tried rotating it a bit, propping it up against objects and so forth. Can't get signal strength higher than 45-50%. I used to use a Netgear adapter which had similar signal strength and never had problems like these, nor would the low signal strength seem to explain the gradual decline in quality over a period of days.
 
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