How to monitor and troubleshoot WiFi connection problems?

Question

I have a problem with WiFi connection at my home.

• Wifi on my desktop computer on Windows 10 ocassionally slows down, but it seems to happen more often when my people come from work.

• My laptop on Windows 10 often looses WiFi connection but works perfectly fine when connected through Ethernet cable.

• My Samsung mobile on Android has stable WiFi connection to the same network.

I would like to:

1. Monitor quality of the connection more systematically for a few days to understand when it happens and for how long and
2. Diagnose whether the problem is with the WiFi router or with OS/driver/network card combination.

How can I do that? What tools, partticularly software, I can use to achieve that?

Answer 1

I guess it depends on how crude you want to be initially. A simple batch file such as:

@echo off
:start
echo %date% %time% >> %USERPROFILE%\desktop\signallog.txt
netsh wlan show interfaces | find "Signal" >> %USERPROFILE%\desktop\signallog.txt
netsh wlan show interfaces | find "State" >> %USERPROFILE%\desktop\signallog.txt
timeout /t 60
goto start

Will record an output (every 60 seconds) such as the following to a file called signallog.txt on the desktop:

22/01/2017 11:17:33.52  
    Signal                 : 99% 
    State                  : connected
22/01/2017 11:18:43.18  
    Signal                 : 99% 
    State                  : connected

In an admin command prompt you may wish to run:

netsh wlan show interfaces 

...just to show you what you could dump to the file.

Hopefully you could at least identify a pattern with such an approach. You can just minimize the command prompt.

Beyond that looking at utilities such as:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/wireless_network_watcher.html

Note:"Options" -> "Advanced Options" could be of interest.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/psping.aspx

may assist you.