Flacky laptop WIFi

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I have a work laptop and personal laptop on my desk. (Never mix). My personal laptop has developed flacky WIFI but WIFI is fine on work laptop at the exact same instant. The personal laptop is a 2 or 3 year old HP Pavilion. The WIFI icon goes from a normal icon to a globe icon. Which means no working WIFI. Sometimes it will come back on its own. I can click disconnect and then connect and it will work again for awhile. Then it repeats. Does not matter 2.4 Ghz or 5 Ghz. I am up to date on Windows updates on Windows 10. I am guessing it's laptop software rather and hardware.

It's kind of a PIA to need to get the WIFI back every 15 to 20 minutes.

Ideas?
 
I went through that on my old (2015-ish) Dell PC with on-board wi-fi recently. I tried installing fresh drivers with no improvement.

I had one of these (lots of brands available out there) on hand, installed it and disabled the on-board wi-fi. No more problems. For

If you're going to add a USB dongle on a laptop, consider the profile of the dongle if you want to be able to keep the laptop portable without removing it every time it goes in the laptop bag. If it lives on your desk, not a problem.

Edited to add link.
 
I've had problems in some HP laptops before where they use wifi cards with two antenna ports and only connect 1 antenna, which in theory is fine for a 1x1 card, but I think it had problems where the ralink driver must've tried to switch to the other antenna and then it'd lose all reception. If the laptop has a 1x1 card check if the driver has any options for disabling antenna diversity or an option to select a specific antenna. Also I've been having some flakiness with my Intel AX200 card recently, when I put the laptop into sleep mode and quickly resume it some times, I have to put it back in sleep mode and leave it a moment before resuming otherwise it's like the card gets stuck in some sleep state and is no longer recognized.
 
And if you're far away from the router, look into an adapter with physical external antennas - you'll get a stronger, more reliable connection. I have several ones similar to this:
 
since its an hp use its update manager and see if you can manually update it. if that doesnt work type in device manager in your windows search and go to network adapters and right click on whatever is your wireless adapter and uninstall the driver then just restart your computer. windows re installs the driver in the restart.

could be a failing wifi card. they're usually replaceable but aren't really worth the hassle and a usb wifi adapter would work fine. they usually have lower signal and worse latency but they still work.
 
If you are comfortable opening a laptop to do something like swapping a drive, it's not a big deal to update a 2.4ghz wifi card in a laptop to a 5ghz card. I've done this in a couple of laptops now. You can usually get the adapters for about $20. Find out what adapter you have in the machine now, does it also provide Bluetooth and then find a similar form factor PCIE adapter for your laptop.

I do recall seeing some issues with some HP, Lenovo, IBM laptops, so you have to make sure the adapter you get is compatible with the machine you have.

Otherwise, the USB dongles are decent. They do make some that are not much bigger than a wireless mouse/keyboard adapter, but I had so-so results using one on oilBabe's old Asus laptop.
 
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You don't mention which HP Pavilion laptop you have. You might start with looking to see if your machine will support something like the following:

Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 802.11 ac 2x2 WiFi + BT 4.0 HP Part # 710661-001

If it does, get one. I believe this is the family of card I used in my upgrades. I just made sure I had the drivers for the card installed before I did the swap. Once I swapped it and booted, the OS discovered the new card and configured it without drama.
 
I’d find an Intel 8260 or 9560 WiFi M.2 card and install that. Hopefully HP’s BIOS aren’t white listed to allow only certain cards to be used. Some newer Intel cards are CVNi-only, meaning the WiFi MAC is part of the PCH(chipset) of the motherboard, and the card just has the radio and physical link, caveat emptor.

I always recommend Intel WiFi for Windows-based computers. Broadcom WiFi works better under ‘nix, be it Linux, Android or iOS/MacOS.
 
It's possible that Wi-Fi device has Power Save mode enabled, you can control that from Device Manager>Network Adaptes>"your Wi-Fi card">Properties>Power Management tab. Look for 'Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power' check box.
 
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