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I have 2 systems in the same room. One is an ancient system that (barely) runs win7 and the other is a brand new system with win8. The old system never gets below 3 bars wifi whereas the new system never gets above 2. Is it safe to assume that the wifi adapter on the new system is simply subpar, or could there be other causes? Are there solutions other than a signal booster?

jamesson
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  • Have you tried swapping the two systems to see if the wifi performance changes? honestly, sounds like you have a sub-par wifi access point to me. Or you've put it inside a metal cabinet. – hookenz Sep 15 '13 at 21:05
  • Your question mentions some kind of large difference in performance but you never explain it. – David Schwartz Sep 15 '13 at 21:52
  • "Bars" isn't a meaningful measure of wifi strength. You may want to grab a book on enterprise 802.11 if you're expected to manage this in a business environment. – MDMarra Sep 16 '13 at 00:44

2 Answers2

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The number of bars is a relative measure that is only meaningful when compared to the bar count on that very same hardware in that very same WiFi band. There's no standard across machines for what 2 bars or 3 bars means.

David Schwartz
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  • Bars generally represents some kind of signal strength. A line is drawn in the sand to represent 100%. Anything stronger still shows 100% – hookenz Sep 15 '13 at 22:12
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    worse yet, "bars" typically only show signal strength ignoring the noise floor. So you could have all the "bars" but an [SNR](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio) low enough to not get a single packet through. – the-wabbit Sep 15 '13 at 22:23
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In my honest opinion, what should matter to you is not a number of "bars" but a tangible metric, showing a difference in performance, or lack thereof.

This should be relatively easy to obtain:

For starters, you will need a third system, perhaps a borrowed laptop, that you will connect via CABLE directly to the modem/router/switch/refrigerator that forms the "core" of your LAN. If possible, use cat6 Ethernet cable and setup the connection for Gigabit speed. Of course both your core device and the third system need to support Gigabit speed for that.

After you are done with the networking part, set up file sharing between the new system and each of the two original ones. You can find how to do this here. It is not important to be able to share files between the original systems, for obvious reasons.

Finally you need to obtain some kind of very large file. You can use neither a folder with many small files, nor a big archive file (like *.zip or *.rar). Use your imagination as to where you can find such a file, but keep in mind that certain multimedia formats, such as 3d video, can produce very large files easily. Store this file in the shared folder of the third system, the one connected via cable.

For the actual test, just drag and drop the file so that it is transferred first via cable and eventually via WiFi to the original systems. Do this first for one, THEN for the second, not at the same time. Note the amount of time it takes for the respective transfers to occur.

This method is not by any means scientific, not by a long shot. You will not by any means find out if one device suffers from poor reception, compared to the other. What you will definitely find out is a much more important metric. This metric is THROUGHPUT, the actual amount of data you get to move in a given amount of time, or vice-versa, the amount of time it takes to move a given amount of data from point A to point B. This is what you should be looking for IMHO, because this is more important than "reception" in your current use case scenario.

dlyk1988
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