I have a very Jumpy(Strong and Weak back and forth) wireless connection! help?

Question

As the question states, My connection jumps back and forth from a connection with 4-5 bars to a connection with 1-2 bars with very little time being spent in the 3 bar range. When I play games on the internet, I have good ping times though I seem to jump around a bit periodically. These jumps are at the moment about 2 seconds in interval from high to low to high. and can go as slow as 10 second intervals.

i have a USB wireless network adapter and am connecting to a router upstairs and I am downstairs. I realize the distance might be something, but I don't understand why that would give me strong signals sometimes. I hope this is something that happens often enough it's a simple fix like a setting change on either my adapter or router.

Thanks for any insight, sorry I don't have details on how the adapter works upstairs.

Answer 1

Most of the time in windows, wireless cards aren't set for their maximum output strength.  There are ways to hack this and bump it up quite a bit.  I'm not exactly sure how to do this, but I've seen how it's done before.  You can google around for it.

You could even test and see if that's the problem.  Linux by default uses 100% power output, so if you downloaded a distro like Ubuntu (it's fairly good at detecting wireless) you should be able to see if your signal strength changes at all.