I wanted to share my experience with a similar wi-fi power saving feature that degraded wireless performance. I work as a Computer Technician in a medium sized PC repair and sales shop. We resell many major name brand laptops to our clients daily. Last year I began noticing some laptops not connecting fully or properly to our wireless access in our shop during testing. The affected laptops were able to access some sites with ease, but timed out on others. After several cases of this, in and out of our office, I discovered the cause was a setting on the wireless adapter. Many new Intel brand wireless adapters have a power management setting is set to “low” or “medium” by default. This setting directly affects the performance of the wireless adapter, even when plugged into AC power. So now, on each new laptop we resell, our techs have to check this setting on the Intel chips and increase the power to “high” before giving to a client. Or they may have wireless connectivity issues from day one. How odd is that? A default setting that actually makes the wireless connectivity problematic, straight from the factory! So far this is related solely to Intel brand adapters and not others, like Broadcom.

Rodney L.
Computer Tech
Morehead City, NC