Test for wifi disconnects

Question

I have received a laptop from someone who has seen it disconnect upto a few times per day from a specific wifi network.

In order to troubleshoot this, I would first like to determine whether the problem also occurs here in our office network.

If it were to happen every 10 minutes I would just use the computer and see whether I experience disconnections, but at an expected rate of once every few hours this is not very practical as I may just miss it for a long time.

I have searched for the solution to this, but I have only found suggested approaches to solve this, without a proper way to test whether the problem actually occurs.

Hence my question:

What is a practical way to test for wifi disconnections/extreme drops in the wifi speed?

Answer 1

For the disconnect you could use something like in this answer.

You could run this on a different computer checklink <ip_of_laptop>.

You could also run this on the laptop itself with checklink <your_network_server>.

checklink.cmd:

@setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion
@echo off
set ipaddr=%1
set oldstate=neither
:loop
set state=up
ping -n 1 !ipaddr! >nul: 2>nul:
if not !errorlevel!==0 set state=down
if not !state!==!oldstate! (
    echo.%time% Link is !state!
    set oldstate=!state!
)
ping -n 2 127.0.0.1 >nul: 2>nul:
goto :loop
endlocal

It will show you when the laptop is offline and also when it comes online again.
Run it for half a day and you'll see if the laptop has disconnect troubles.

(the ping -n 2 127.0.0.1 is a pause to not constantly bombard the laptop with pings)

Answer 2

I would say if bandwidth isn't a problem you can download a very large file. if the connection drops then the download will be stopped when you return.

The other thing you can do is to get yourself a bandwidth monitor, they monitor network traffic so you will be able to see speed drops and disconnects on the graphs they give as well.

Hope this helps.