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27 Posts
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1474
April 16th, 2020 10:00
Inspiron 15 3552 slow wifi speeds
I'm struggling guys. Have 50 Mbps down with comcast, yet this darned laptop won't connect at over 1 - 3 Mbps anywhere in the house.
All the rest of our phones/laptops connect at faster speeds.
speedtest.net typically responds with "socket error", but sometimes will succeed and show the slow download speed.
Warranty is expired (laptop less than 2 years old) so am considering buying new wireless network adapter?
Currently has Intel(R) Dual Band Wireless-AC 3165
thanks
c
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barneytoe
27 Posts
0
April 17th, 2020 07:00
I did a full win10 reset, wiping everything and still same problem.
My work win10 laptop sitting next to my Inspiron shows 50 Mbps down.
Strange thing is the Inspiron returns wildly variable results. One test shows 2 Mbps, next shows 19 Mbps just one minute later.
"netsh wlan show all" on BOTH computers says this;
radio type = 802.11ac
Channel = 149 (this means 5 GHz wifi band).
Lastly, Resource Monitor is showing CPU is maxed throughout entire test. I wonder if I should be considering RAM upgrade (from 4 Gb)?
barneytoe
27 Posts
0
April 18th, 2020 08:00
SOLVED - wow was that painful.
1) re-install from scratch win10, choosing the option to wipe everything - got stuck at 64% (common problem) so had to download to USB to finish this
2) un-installed all the bloatware that came with new win10
3) win10 Disk Cleanup: scan and repair errors, then defrag
4) Re-install Dell support assistant, it would identify updates but get stuck completing, so I could see 3 drivers it wanted to update, so I downloaded them individually:
intel wifi driver
serial i/o driver
graphics driver
Noteworthy: web based dell driver update always failed for me
Just for kicks I'm going to upgrade to 8Gb RAM anyways, as CPU is always nearly fully pegged.
Shame on Dell for having so many support options that barely function and fail at every opportunity.
barneytoe
27 Posts
0
April 20th, 2020 05:00
One final update, replacing the RAM on 3552 isn't simple. Many of the youtube videos were incorrectly showing other Inspiron models that have easy access panel on back to RAM, but for this one you have to remove entire back face, keyboard and DVD drive before you can get to RAM. This video was helpful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-stMlSmX3Rg