The Problem

As a consultant I am issued a variety of laptops by clients in addition to my own Lenovo X1 Carbon. I am currently using is a Dell Latitude 7450, and it’s WIFI has been causing me problems. It is very slow, maybe 2Mb/s when other devices on the same WIFI network are seeing 200 to 250 Mb/s.

I had been ignoring this problem for a while as I was able to use a docking station which gave me Ethernet networking, so bypassing the issue. However, after changing location this was no longer an option. So I had to do something about the root cause.

The Solution

After a bit of research I saw it was not uncommon for people to report having performance issues with Intel BE200 320MHz WIFI devices in Windows 11. Many settings changes were suggested, none that I tried addressed the issue for me.

What did work was the following:

1. Find an old USB WIFI dongle (I could have also just my Ethernet if it had been available, as all that is needed is an Internet connection to download drivers)
2. In Device Manager remove the BE200 WIFI device, selecting the option to remove drivers
3. Make sure you can still connect to the Internet
4. In Device Manager re-detect devices, the BE200 should be found and drivers installed
5. Remove the other WIFI/Ethernet connection.
6. Connect to Internet via the re-added BE200

Once this was done my performance leapt to over 200Mb/s.

Why this process worked and just updating the drivers did not I have no idea, but at least it worked and I have the performance I would expect.

For the original version of this post see Richard Fennell's personal blog at Fix for slow WIFI performance on Dell Latitude Laptop