WiFi Problems

[Nerd House]

Dunno where else to go about this problem, used Google to try to solve it, and it was seemingly solved, but now it's a problem again.

I live in a house with 3 roommates. We all share internet and WiFi. We've never, ever had problems, at least not in the 12 years we've lived together. Our newest roommate lives in a room on the end of the house, and has to use WiFi to connect her phone and laptop to the internet. We simply can't run a cable all the way over there.

At first, her laptop and phone were fine. They could connect with decent signal strength. But over time, that became a problem. Signal got weaker and she could not stay connected for very long. We NEVER had this problem with previous roommates, and they used the WiFi for their Xbox (playing online competitively with no issues) and their phones. But for some reason, this roommate has gotten all the problems.

We thought maybe the signal strength wasn't good enough, so we went out and bought a WiFi Extender. Set it up, she could connect with great signal. This setup has worked for about a month, but now today she is having signal problems again.

Our WiFi Network is locked, with a 32 character password that's literally random gibberish. Can't really afford to go out and buy anything extra. Is there anything we can do to pinpoint what the problem might be and fix it? It's just really strange that none of our 4 previous roommates had a problem, but she does.

Thank you for reading.

 

[TheDrunk]

Update the wifi cards driver.
DO a clean install, so delete them and reinstall.
Set her wifi in power management to maximum performance, on the wifi adapter make sure it is not set to allow pc to put this device to sleep.
Download CCleaner, and clean up the computer.

Does she have any devices in the room which will interfere with wifi signal
Such as microwave, a fan, lead paint, etc etc.
Anything in the hall way between your wifi device and her laptop phone.

Now, once she cleans up her device you must know how she uses it. she might be having a great connection but have to many things running on both devices which take band with and can give crappy connection. such as to many tabs open ( mobile phone) she might have background apps that are using internet creating bad connection type of behavior.

 

[carnageX]

Is the weak signal on both her phone and laptop? If so, then it's an issue with the access point and/or router. If it's just on her laptop or just on the phone, then it's possibly an issue with the specific device.

Brand/model of the router and access point?

If it's affecting both devices, then I would suggest simply power cycling the router for 30 seconds and see if that solves the issue. If it does, then it's definitely something wrong with the router.

I would also suggest seeing if there's a firmware update for your router.

 

[Nerd House]

Been a little while, but here's an update:

Setup the extender and a repeater, she was able to connect and stay connect fine since about 2 days after I made the OP.

However, today she mysteriously lost internet connection. The extender and repeater "networks" both show up on her Network Connection list, but she cant connect to them.

Here's the modem/router. And yes, I've cleaned it up since this picture. xD

Here's the Extender, it's a NetGear. Sorry for bad photo quality.

And here's the Repeater:

Issues like this are really making me want to get OUT of the Networking field, as everything just MYSTERIOUSLY stops working after awhile no matter what I do.