IT Tips for Engineers

Welcome to my Ted talk, I felt like sharing some of my low effort diagnostics tonight.

The right drivers are more important than we give them credit for, Windows 10 started downloading best guess drivers for us and engineers stopped caring universally.

The wrong wifi driver can be the difference between wireless connections speeds of 300/300mbps and 800/800mbps.

If you're working on a machine that suffers from wifi issues or you suspect it's been wiped and reloaded the drivers might actually be Microsoft's best guess based on machine hardware IDs.

To remediate this, go to devmgmt.msc > Network Adapters > Find the wireless card and google drivers for it IE: "Wireless-AC 9260 Drivers" > Download the latest drivers from the OEM > if they come in a zip of DLL's and security cat files, simply extract the zip and go back to devmgmt.msc and right click on the wireless adapter > Update Drivers > Browse my computer for drivers > and browse to the folder you extracted the drivers to, it will do the rest.

You'll immediately see wifi speeds increase without reboot.

Longer version: if you have a harder to find device.

Go to devmgmt.msc > Network Adapters > Right click properties > Details > Change property value to: Hardware Ids > It will look like: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2526&SUBSYS_00148086&REV_29 > Google this Ids and you'll usually be taken to the exact driver that works best for it, Obvi choose a trusted source like Intel or Broadcom in this case.

If anyone reads this please let me know if it made any sense, it was all stream of consciousness.