I’ve been wondering why my ping times have been so high on my laptop, and so low on any other computer I have here. I finally found the culprit.
The Intel 2915 wireless card (part of the whole Centrino package) has a power saving mode with 3 options, High, Medium, and Low (creative eh?). Mine was set to high. Which created pings that varied from 20ms to 400ms. Going to medium brings the average down to 2ms, which I can deal with.
Why this is a separate setting in Access Connections (the utility used on Thinkpads to manage different connection settings) rather than in the Power Manager as part of a profile? I don’t know. Ideally it would switch to high when I unplug, and go medium when I’m plugged in.
Anyway, always good to know why stuff happens. Very good for gaming, VoIP or anything where latency is an issue.
2 replies on “High Pings”
That’s quite odd, I don’t recall seeing a simalar setting for either my laptop’s Broadcom (under Mac OS X) or the Netgear under Windows. Why the wireless chipset requires a power saving setting is beyond me, it shouldn’t use too much power shouldn’t it?
James: it’s to save power. That was a key goal of the “centrino” plan. Wireless and longer battery life.
I found medium to be a good setting. We’ll see if that continues to be the case.