surface WIFI issues

[Enuch]

Does anyone know how to fix this issue?

My wife has a Surface (think 2 or 3) and for a while it worked fine with no issues using the wifi and for the last month or two the second she turns on the WIFI in for her tablet it shuts down the internet to a crawl for everyone and makes the internet virutally unusable. We have pinpointed it to just being her device. We can run my laptop, her work laptop, the Xbox and Amazon all at the same time no issues. But if even nothing is on and she uses her tablet its useless online.

Any thoughts or insights on how to fix it would be appreciated!

[Naelan]

any chance she has something like carbonite or dropbox running on the Surface? File syncing programs can consume a ton of bandwidth.

[chalion]

virtually unusable or doesnt work at all anymore ? sounds almost like a duplicate IP address knocking out the router or something. Did someone try to fix something on it recently and change the network settings by putting in static information instead of DHCP ?

[Enuch]

any chance she has something like carbonite or dropbox running on the Surface? File syncing programs can consume a ton of bandwidth.

How would I check these things?


virtually unusable or doesnt work at all anymore ? sounds almost like a duplicate IP address knocking out the router or something. Did someone try to fix something on it recently and change the network settings by putting in static information instead of DHCP ?

No idea, both of us are not tech saavy and to be honest I have no idea what this even means but if there is a way to check how would I know?

[Naelan]

Look in the system tray and hover over the icons in there. It should tell you what is running by hovering over the small icons.

http://www.phx-is.com/phx-is/Images/offsite-backup-system/system-tray.jpg

[Enuch]

she had creative cloud on that I shut off and she has to manually open now, and we also tried shutting off her printer. Works now, but we had similar success the other night and then tonight back to not working.

Interesting note, when I tried to IPconfig release it woudln't and said no media was connected and then when I tried to ipconfig renew also said couldn't because no media was connected. not sure if that is normal or not.

[Allereli]

press ctrl+alt+esc and go to the startup tab and disable everything you don't need on startup

[Wesley]

I'm not 100% familiar with the OS Surface uses, but I do know that Windows 10 will automatically opt you in to use your bandwidth to p2p updates to their other users, and constantly be trafficking information back and forth to their own servers as it mines data. If the OS Surface is running has that, and the rest of your machines are running Windows 7 for example, it could be the OS itself hogging up your bandwidth if it's extremely limited.

It makes a huge difference however if your household internet merely slows versus actually completely shutting down on where the problem may actually lie though. Are you able to still use the internet on other machines while the surface is causing problems? Or are things like websites completely inaccessible?

Beyond that, what sort of internet package are you running? Is it reliable, or very basic? Try going to http://www.speedtest.net/ and checking the results of that. That should give us a better overall idea of the quality of your connection to start with.

[chalion]

Surfaces runs windows 8.1 unless they opted to update to windows 10. Same as any desktop just has a touch screen interface for the primary interactions. Its a full blown desktop OS for all purposes of troubleshooting.

[Whirlin]

Make sure you patch your OS and check for hardware driver updates. I know that if you get super behind in windows updates, it can be patching in the background and use up a substantial amount of bandwith.