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Tom in St. Cloud, Minnesota Listens on AM1450 KNSI and asked: "Have a question about my home Wi-Fi system. I have a desktop computer that when it is on our home wi-fi, it seems to block out my Android phone, Kindle and just about everything else that works on the wi-fi except for my laptop. I'm kinda baffled on how to fix that. If you have any suggestions, that would be great."

 

Tom, this is a tough one to diagnose, especially hands off.

There could be several causes for this, the first one is your router settings. You could have a low number of available IP addresses, or a subnet issue. The easiest way to test for this is to connect a new device to the network while every device but the desktop is on. If some start disconnect, you may have a network issue.

The most likely cause is a software issue though. Some poorly designed network programs can try to query everyone else on the network so much that they create an extreme amount of traffic. Lenovo used to have this problem with a piece of network storage software running through a file called Discover.exe. If your desktop happens to be a Lenovo computer, that may be worth looking for.

Some viruses can cause this too. Generally speaking, it’s rarely the intention, the virus maker probably doesn’t care about your network’s connectivity, but they may be trying to spam an outside server in a DDoS attack or do just about anything else that uses significant bandwidth and can overwhelm a router.

Obviously, the solution there is a virus scan and potentially wiping your machine and starting over.

There could also be a problem with your router, but given that this happens when you connect your desktop, there is probably a software cause and the desktop is likely to blame.

 

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