Wifi Troubleshooting

[strife]

As for the powerline adapter.  They seem to work relatively well.  Mine is an Actiontec, 500BMPS kit(Model PWR500). I've had mine for a couple years and the connection seems to be adequate for what my wife does and generally it seems to be online.  It drops every once in a while but for the most part seems to be good.  Her computer is on the north side of my house upstairs and the router and other side of the power line adapter is on the south side and down stairs, so it has to travel a pretty good ways to get any connection.

Does she do any gaming?  Any idea what causes the drops?  I would never game using the range extender for example if I could at all help it.  Is the powerline connection worse than just dealing with WiFi where latency and/or packet loss matters?

No she doesn't do any gaming, she just uses it for internet and stuff like that.  You can get the adapters for less than $50; you should just buy one and try it out and it doesn't seem to be working for you, just return it. 

I just asked her how often her internet goes down and she said it's generally pretty good, the times when it's gone down recently it turned out that it was because the adapter was turned off(probably due to a power outage) and she was actually on wifi, not the powerline adapter.  Once I turned the adapter back on she was good. 

I just ran an internet speed test on her computer, and she's only getting like 2-4 MBPS download(where I'm getting 100+).  My powerline adapter says it's a 500+ mbps, but her computer is really far away.  2-4 MBPS may not be enough for gaming... weird though, she's getting like 4-5 upload which is all I get as well.