Wake on LAN settings Screws up Wifi - Disable your "Wake on" Features

Long story short - have a windoze PC for Zwift (gaming) and the WiFi got progressively worse - went from intermittently working to never working.

Sometimes the windoze dialogs would show the wifi adapter as disabled, other times not disabled but the network center would say "no internet" access. 

Really no reason at all to suspect the wifi signal (all other devices in house work) or really the PC hardware. 

Solution is to disable the 

  • Wake on LAN feature in the wireless adapter but especially
  • Wake on Magic Packet
  • Wake on Pattern 

(Can look here to see what these settings look like). 

When I clicked disable on the last two I could see the internet spring to life in real time. 

Interestingly, many, many years ago I wrote a blog post on Wake on LAN (this was for wired not wireless) that was also a problem. My take is if you see "Wake on ..." when it comes to Networking - be afraid, be very afraid. It's maybe useful in some specific use cases but for "normal users" it can make your networking life miserable.


 

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