Make Windows Better
Diagnose Wi-fi problems
A Wi-fi connection that constantly drops out can be infuriating. One way to diagnose the problem is to run Windows’ built-in Wi-fi reporting tool. While some of the information in the report is highly technical, anyone can use it to glean basic information, as well as see which wireless networks your computer has been connecting to.
To access the report, open Command Prompt with administrator privileges by clicking Start, typing CMD, then right-clicking the Command Prompt result and selecting ‘Run as administrator’ (if a User Account Control window appears, select Yes).
In the Command Prompt window, type netsh wlan show wlanreport (see screenshot 1 ). Once the report is complete, you’ll see ‘Report written to’, followed by the report’s file location. Copy this file path (starting with ‘C:\’) by highlighting it with your mouse then pressing Ctrl+c (if you can’t highlight the text, right-click the Command Prompt window’s title bar, select Properties, then tick the Quick Edit Mode option). Next, open a web browser, paste the file location in the address bar, then press Enter.
The report will now appear, with a chart at the top showing Wi-fi activity over the past couple of days. Each green section of the chart indicates a connection. Hover over one of these and you’ll see the connect and disconnect times, along with the reason for the loss of connection. Hover over the C (connect) and D (disconnect) icons at the top and you’ll see which network your PC was connected to at the time.
If you see a lot of sessions of short durations (as in screenshot 2 ), it could be due to your computer constantly switching between your 2.4GHZ and 5GHZ networks – see page 51 to find out how to split these networks and resolve the problem.