More and more people are using the Wi-Fi hotspots to connect to the Internet. This is perhaps because of ready availability of the Wi-Fi adapters and network cards in all sorts of devices ranging from mobile phones, tablets, computers and notebooks to multimedia electronics like television. Moreover there are tons of free access Wi-Fi hotspots available everywhere you go be it your office, school, college, university, public park, restaurants or hotels. You can even create your own portable Wi-Fi hotspot on your mobile phone or on your computer easily. But the Wi-Fi internet access is limited by the strength of the Wi-Fi network signal. The Wi-Fi signal reduces in strength if you are not close enough to the Wi-Fi hotspot or if your Wi-Fi network adapter does not have enough power.
You can easily boost the Wi-Fi network signal strength and get faster or stable internet access by increasing the transmit power of your Wi-Fi network adapter in Windows. Here is how:
- Press the hotkey Win + R to open the Run dialog. Type devmgmt.msc in the Run dialog and press Enter.
- This would open the Device Manager for the hardware in your Windows PC. In the Device Manager, you would see all the devices currently installed in your PC categorized according to their function types – Networking Devices, USB Controllers, Mice and other pointing devices and more. The Wi-Fi LAN device would be listed under the Network Adapters category. Right-click on your Wi-Fi LAN device and select Properties from the right-click menu.
- In the Wi-Fi adapter’s properties dialog, switch to the Advanced tab and select the Transmit Power property. Then change its value to Highest as shown in the following snapshot:
- Click on the OK button to save the settings and close all the open windows.
That’s it. Now your Wi-Fi LAN network adapter would use the highest possible transmit power and this would result in a sudden boost in the signal strength as well as the stability of your Wi-Fi network. If you do not have the “Transmit Power” property for your Wi-Fi adapter, then it does not support manual selection of the transmit power and would automatically adjust the power level to that of your notebook or desktop computer. Some of the network adapters also have a Green Tx property which defines automatic boost in transmit power depending on your distance from the Wi-Fi hotspot source.