So I just found out my laptop I bought refurbished in 2014 has a 1999 wifi card. WTF! It’s true. I have a laptop I bought way back when, refurbished for like $200. At the time it had windows 8 and a very good PC brand I have always favored Gateway. Yes, Gateway went out of business but they sold to some other company. It’s probably one of the last Gateway branded products but maybe not…
But why on earth are they giving me 1999 tech? Super weird. Ive always kept it plugged into the router directly and never noticed any slowness. Full ISP provided Mbs capability. But since Ive switched to a Macbook Pro I don’t use the laptop that much. But lately been tinkering around on it and I noticed the wifi connection is super slow. And I don’t have the 5ghz network option. It will only show and connect to 2.5ghz wifi. On top of that, I was getting like 10-20 Mbs. Not acceptable. I decided to do some digging. Turns out my card is 802.11b, this was the protocol in 1999!
Okay time for an upgrade. Turns out super simple to replace the wifi card and didn’t even cost me a pretty penny! $15-$19 actually. Why didn’t I do this earlier? Well being hard wired, I never noticed a difference. And hard wired is really the way to go. But come on, 1999? Seriously?!?!?