Last night when I was at the Cafe Orlin restaurant, I opened my Windows Notebook and started to browse some sites over the free Wi-Fi internet, as I waited for the order to be served. I noticed that my friend Natalia’s Android tablet was downloading much faster than my Windows Notebook. At first I blamed Windows for the slower download speeds, but later I adjusted a few settings in Windows and got higher download speeds. The problem was that my Wi-Fi adapter was set to conserve battery power and so was working at very low power settings and because of that the data download speed was suffering.
If you want to get the maximum performance from the Wi-Fi adapter in Windows, then you can change its power settings to maximum power use level and improve its overall performance. You can follow these simple steps to set the power settings for your Wi-Fi adapter:
- Press the hotkey Win + R to open the Run dialog. In the Run dialog, type control powercfg.cpl and press Enter. This would open the Power options in the Control Panel. You can also manually navigate to Power Options in the Control Panel without using the Run dialog.
- The Power Options window shows the current power plan settings for your Windows PC. You have to click on the Change plan settings against the power plan that you are using (Balanced or Power saver).
- In the Edit Plan Settings window, you can see the sleep timeout and turn-off-monitor timeout settings. You have to click on the Change advanced power settings near the lower edge of the window.
- In the Advanced settings window, you can find the Wireless Adapter Settings in the listbox. Then expand the settings for the wireless adapter by clicking on the + sign. You have to set the Power Saving Mode setting to Maximum Performance in order to get the maximum performance from the Wi-Fi adapter.
- Click on the OK button to save the settings. Now you can close the Control Panel windows and start using the Wi-Fi with improved performance.
Once the power mode for your Wi-Fi adapter has been set to maximum performance, your Wi-Fi will be always on and will not turn of by itself in order to save the battery power. But if you using a notebook that has a Wi-Fi switch, then you can use this switch to quickly turn the Wi-Fi off using this flip switch.