I’d run into a problem this week with the wifi in my home. I have a mixed network, some wifi, some wired for a total of about seven or eight computers in my home. The problem was with my HP laptop and it’s cheap Broadcom wifi adapter. In my usual morning writing spot, I had limited, or very slow, Internet access.
I have a widget on my desktop that shows me my wifi strength but it registered 62%, even though I had incredibly slow access to the Internet from the dining room. On the weekend, I moved my Dlink 615 router upstairs, partially because I wanted to surf and write on the back deck, and partially to solve the dining room problem. No go!
That’s when Heatmapper came in to save me. Heatmapper is a free bit of software that you can download here:
Heatmapper download
Once you get it downloaded, unzipped and installed, run it and you’ll see a simple screen, graph paper one one side and some writing on the right. Basically you want to map out your house on the graph on the left. Walk to where you normally use your laptop. Imagine the room on the graph paper and left click on the graph. Move slowly to another spot, keeping in mind the spatial relationship to the first point, and left click again. Walk around the house and click now and then to get a complete map of your house, according to the wifi signal strength.
Once you are done, right click and Heatmapper will display a kind of topographical map of your home. How cool is that? Very cool in my case since I saw that I didn’t have a lot of signal strength in the dining room.
My next step was to drag out my old Panasonic Toughbook and do the same thing with it. In this way, I was comparing apples to apples. If Heatmapper saw something different on my Toughbook map, then I knew that the Broadcom adapter on my HP was screwed up. Turns out it was totally out of whack. I disabled it, installed a cheap TRENDnet USB adapter and, voila, I had good access everywhere in the house.
Who knows what’s up with the Broadcom adapter in my HP laptop? I don’t. I have uninstalled it and will look around the net for driver updates, troubleshooting charts, etc. but, for now, my old USB adapter works just fine, thank you! And thanks to Heatmapper, I know where to get the strongest signal in my house. Check it out. It’s free and very, very helpful.