PLEASE help me completely get rid of wireless and go back to wired net connection!!

Hey all,

So it seemed like a good idea to set up a wireless network with a TP-Link modem… but it’s been a nightmare from beginning to end. Nothing but the slowest connections I have ever seen, and all the time. Even when one of the computers does NOT have a wireless connection and is using the old ethernet… it’s just as slow. The network claims to not be the wireless one… but it is unbearably slow, completely different from the way it used to work.

I know there are probably a zillion techie things that could be done to try to improve the wireless… I am working 60 hours a week minimum, I can’t add one more thing to do, and I just want out of this. All I want is to go back to the way things were before, when I had nothing but a wired connection. PLEASE, can someone tell me how to use the nuclear option and completely get rid of that wireless network!!!

This probably means the slowdown isn’t related to your wireless connection. I don’t know enough about your setup to say what it is related to, but I’m pretty sure getting rid of the WiFi portion of your home network isn’t going to give you the speed increase you want.

Anyway, the simplest way to get rid of WiFi is to replace your WiFi-enabled router with one that doesn’t support WiFi and only supports multiple Ethernet connections. I don’t know how easy it would be to find such a router these days, however.

What’s your internet speed like when you plug an ethernet cable from your modem directly into a PC or laptop? Bypass the wireless network first and see what you get.

ETA…re-read the OP and saw you tried this. If that’s the case it isn’t your wireless network…it’s either your machine or your ISP…or maybe something else I’m not thinking of.

I would strongly suggest hiring a local geek to fix this for you.

There could be many reasons for what you describe and simply turning off wireless for your current system may not fix it.

Simplest quick fix attempt - You can try disabling the wifi on your computer, for me it is as easy as pressing the F2 button, without the the wifi adapter enabled there will be no hunting for a wireless connection to get in the way of the wired one.

As for the nuke option, buy a eithernet router without wifi, replace physical wifi router with this one.

Did you connect the computer’s ethernet port directly to the cable modem (or equivalent), or just to the wired port on the router?

I disabled the wireless and plugged the ethernet cable directly from the cable box into the computer. It isn’t really any different. It does connect and find things eventually, but the words “looking up” and “waiting for” linger in the lower left corner of the screen for a VERY long time.

The network has claimed all along that the strength is “excellent.” All I know is that these connection problems only began after having the wireless set up, and there were really never problems before. It would be at least $130 to have anyone come out here. Crying may be an option…

ETA: I guess I would say that it’s at least SOME kind of improvement to plug the ethernet cable directly into the cable box. But it’s still a lot slower than it used to be.

If the problem persists when the router isn’t involved it very likely has nothing to do with the wireless network.

It is possible that if you installed some software on your computer to communicate with your wireless router, the software might be slowing your computer. I would try uninstalling that software since you’ve already given up on the wifi.

But I agree with others – if you’re plugged straight into the web through an ethernet port on your computer, the wifi itself isn’t the problem.

Something from the old days that fogged me on more than one occasion; Dynamic Name Servers/System (DNS). I thought finding correct ones was automatic now but your machine may be searching for some static location. Maybe your ISP can help in this area.

I can’t recall ever seeing a signal strength indicator on a wired connection. If you’re still seeing an indication that your signal strength is “excellent,” that suggests to me that you’re still using the wifi, whether you mean to be or not.

No that’s not true. There’s a Windows function which shows all active wifi systems in range and shows their signal strength, whether or not you’re using any of them.

Have you actually turned off the computer’s “wireless radio”? I have a similar problem to you (my wifi sucks, extremely slow, despite multiple attempts at troubleshooting), and have to use ethernet cables. Until I figured out that I needed to actually turn off the wireless radio, my computer would still occasionally insist on trying to use the wifi, even when it was plugged in.

Oh, good point. I misunderstood the OP to be saying that they were seeing their current network to be rated for strength.

Yeah, I would do a couple of things. I’d completely turn off the computer’s wifi and I’d go into Network options and remove all wireless networks from its list. I’ve had problems where a computer that has a wireless network in its memory will try to use that instead of a wired connection.

My old computer, like this one was plugged directly into the router. Other computers etc use the wireless. The old computer used to, for no reason that I could determine, randomly connect using its inbuilt wireless modem - and go pretty slow until I manually redirected it.