Download Wireless Card Adapter Settings and their purpose

Changing the preferred bandwidth:
I was looking at four different laptops and found that only one of them had the capability to select
between 2.4 and 5 GHz bandwidth. There are other settings such as
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"Roaming Aggressiveness"(rate that your wireless adapter switches to a different router with
stronger signal)
"Roam Tendency"(allows to roam (reconnect) to a different wireless router/AP if the signal
difference is significant, thus it only applies when you have different wireless router/APs
providing the same work (like in an university or big company)) and
"Roaming Decision"(This decides when it will start to roam; it is the signal strength value that
determines when the WLAN card starts scanning for another wireless router/AP. The default is
75 dB, you can choose to optimize bandwidth (65 dB) or optimize distance (85 dB). Just like
Roam Tendency, this setting only matters when you have different wireless router/APs
available) which I looked up for definitions of their purpose.
Here is the link to where I got these definitions: <http://superuser.com/questions/342759/cansomebody-explain-about-wi-fi-device-manager-settings-and-power-settings-in-w>
(The User Guide for the specific wireless card also may have valuable information about this.)
Below are the purpose of adapter settings. Most likely we only need Bandwidth preference, capability,
and anything to do with roaming.
Wireless Card Adapter Settings and their purpose
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802.11h+d
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This option restricts your card to either 802.11h, 802.11d or both; which are under
certain regulations. For example, 802.11h is designed to comply with European
regulations. If you want to comply to those, this option is for you; but in general, I live
there and I'm just using 802.11n.
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Afterburner
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Only when you have a 802.11g network, enabling this option on both the router as your
laptop can result in a better throughput. You might want to verify change with a speed
and ping test though. Be sure to read the documentation provided by both your wireless
card and router for an explanation and to check compatibility...
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Antenna Diversity
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This only applies if you have two antennas, you can select which antenna to use.
However, you should probably leave this to the default which automatically switches
between both antennas based on the signal strength.
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AP Compatibility Mode
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If you have a very old router, this option will trade performance for compatibility. You
don't need this option if you are already able to internet with your network card and are
connected to the right AP.
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Band Preference
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This option might be handy if you have interference at home on the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz
band or need to comply to regulations that restrict the use of a band; it's best to leave
this to it's default so that you can connect to both as you can just configure the band on
the router to avoid interference.
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Bandwidth Capability
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Within a frequency range like 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz, 20 MHz stands for a single channel
while 40 MHz will take multiple neighboring channels. As this again can be configured in
the router, you can leave this to the default as you most likely don't want to restrict the
compatibility of your card.

Bluetooth Collaboration
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This avoids your WiFi and Bluetooth from interferring each other by surpressing each
others signal when they are both sending something, unless you have throughput
problems on either it's best to leave this option enabled.

BSS Mode
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This can again be used to restrict your card to 802.11b/g or 802.11b, it's best to leave
this option default for compatibility reasons unless you need to change them under
certain regulations.
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BT-AMP
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This amplifies Bluetooth by sending it over a 802.11 link, where you can get 10x speed
compared to the Bluetooth standard. You could try to play with this option if you need
improved Bluetooth performance.
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Disable Bands
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Rather than giving a band preference, this actually disables a band. This thus has the
same reasoning as listed under the "Band Preference" bullet point; use your router
instead...
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Disable Upon Wired Connection

Does what it says. It's up to yourself to see what works best if you have this use case.

Fragmentation Threshold
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The size at which a packet is is fragmented into multiple packets, see MTU for more
details. In the past, I usually have set this to 1492 given that's the maximum my
connection could support; but now I'm using jumbo frames on my network so I removed
the limit again.
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You can determine the largest MTU possible for your connection and optionally change
this option. You might want to test just like I mentioned in the "Afterburner" bullet point.
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IBSS 54g Protection Mode

Although a weird name, this is an implementation of 802.11 RTS/CTS which is only
enabled when a 802.11b node joins an ad hoc network; if you are sure there won't be
such nodes you could disable this option, but given that it's automatic you can leave it
default.
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IBSS Mode
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Most likely you are not using an ad hoc network, but this allows you to select whether to
use 802.11b or 802.11g in that case. In a normal use case you don't need to change
this setting.
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Locally Administered MAC Address
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Allows you to change the MAC Address of your wireless network card, please note that
they must remain unique. I would suggest against changing this, unless you need it for
one or another reason.
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Minimum Power Consumption

This will stop scanning for networks or turn off the camera when you disconnect from a
network or when your laptop is idle. This is enabled by default, this might help the
network card to reconnect when the signal is low so you might want to try to disable it.

PLCP Header

This sets the Complimentary Code Keying header, by default it automatically switched
between long and short based on the situation the card is in. It's best to leave it like this
as it removes overhead in some situations, in extreme occasions it might be necessary
to set this to long.

Priority & VLAN

By default; the packets in the queue are transmitted on a first-come, first-served basis,
regardless of any priority information within the packet. When enabling this setting you
can give certain classes [background (BG), best-effort (BE), video (VI), and voice (VO)]
a priority in the queue. Then you can optionally choose whether the VLAN has priority or
not. This setting is related to QoS, it doesn't help with low signal problems but rather
when you want to attempt to improve throughput of certain classes.
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Rate (802.11a)
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Here, you can limit the rate. You should not need to do this.
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Rate (802.11b/g)
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Here, you can limit the rate. You should not need to do this.
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Roam Tendency

This setting allows to roam (reconnect) to a different wireless router/AP if the signal
difference is significant, thus it only applies when you have different wireless router/APs
providing the same work (like in an university or big company).

The default is set to a difference of 20 dB, aggresive will set this to 10 dB and
conservative sets this to 30 dB. The names of these options sure have a meaning, note
that changing between wireless router/APs isn't instant.
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Roaming Decision

This decides when it will start to roam; it is the signal strength value that determines
when the WLAN card starts scanning for another wireless router/AP. The default is 75
dB, you can choose to optimize bandwidth (65 dB) or optimize distance (85 dB). Just like
Roam Tendency, this setting only matters when you have different wireless router/APs
available.
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RTS Threshhold
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RTS stands for "Request to Send", this setting controls at what packet size the low level
protocol issues an RTS packet. The default is 2346.
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NetGear lists several trade-offs to consider setting this parameter:
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Using a small value causes RTS packets to be sent more often, consuming more of the
available bandwidth, therefore reducing the apparent throughput of the network packet.
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However, the more RTS packets that are sent, the quicker the system can recover from
interference or collisions -- as would be the case in a heavily loaded network, or a
wireless network with much electromagnetic interference.
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Thus, if there aren't much stations it's best to leave this to it's default; if you instead in a
heavily loaded network then lowering this option can help stability / throughput.
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Wake-up Mode
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This allows for waking the network card up from a low power state when it receives an
amount of packets; this can result in a difference in response time when you host a
server and nobody was connected for some time, note that this includes services like
hosting files over the local network.
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WMM
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Wi-Fi MultiMedia is a set of features for Wi-Fi networks that improve the user experience
for audio, video, and voice applications by prioritizing data traffic.
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As with any features that try to improve your experience, it's necessary to test whether
the setting has a positive or negative impact on the data traffic you do. While this setting
works for most users, it doesn't work for every use case that exist there. This does,
however, not improve reception.