#1 ·
Does anyone have any insight into what might be happening here? I’m running into this incredibly frustrating issue where my wireless data transfer just drops out constantly, but in a very specific, bizarre way. I’ll be browsing—doesn't matter if I'm using Firefox or Chrome—and suddenly everything just freezes. Pages won't load for ten seconds or more, and sometimes they don't load at all. It feels like the wireless connection just snaps. Every once in a while, I’ll see that little exclamation point over the Wi-Fi icon in my taskbar, though even that doesn't seem to perfectly sync up with when the traffic actually dies. What’s truly baffling, though, is that I never experience these dropouts while I'm downloading torrents; the connection stays rock solid and the download speed remains steady. In fact, I’ve started testing this during those longer freeze-ups, and something really strange happens: the moment I start a torrent download (which kicks off instantly and smoothly), the web browsing on Firefox unfreezes almost simultaneously. To make matters worse, my phone and my other laptop both have an excellent connection to the same router, so it makes zero sense to me that my laptop's network card is the culprit, especially since the torrenting works fine. I've checked my background processes and there's hardly anything running, and the laptop itself is performing perfectly fine otherwise.