When reading this article, you are experiencing sporadic & recurring connection dropouts or latency spikes on Wireless-N (802.11n) networks. Switching to Wireless-G (802.11g) solves the latency/lag spikes and/or recurring connection dropouts.
More information:
Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6200
Make sure to continue below to perform a diagnosis!
This is not the same as Intel PROSet's version. For example: Installing Intel PROSet 16.7.0, will install driver 15.10.5.1 on Windows 8.1, look here for more information)
In Command Prompt enter 'ping www.google.com -n 150'.
This will ping www.google.com 150 times.
Depending on Roaming Sensitivity it may scan more often or less often. In the screenshot above we observe a lag spike of approximately 3 seconds.
WARNING: This solution may not work on all wireless cards. Some wireless cards may not be supported on driver version 14.x
This solution is recommended for Windows 8 users at time of writing. Users can always test newer drivers and then revert to the inbox Windows 8 driver.
Revert back to driver branch 14.x, this can be done by uninstalling all Intel drivers when a driver with version 15.x is installed.
This solution is for advanced users. The advantage of this solution is that you can always use the latest up-to-date driver. A disadvantage is that your wireless card won't scan for other networks when connected, your list of wireless networks may or may not be up to date when connected.
NOTE: When installing new drivers, the value of ScanningWhenAssociated may automatically return to 1
It seems there are a ton of people with this problem, and this is the first actual solution I have found to it - nice work!
Some people are forcing the wireless adapter to work only in wireless G mode, which gets rid of the ping spikes, but of course prevents wireless N mode. Others are doing various forms of magical incantations, but no one else seems to have solved this correctly.
One thing to note is that I actually had two separate registry folders for my wireless network adapter - I first changed "ScanWhenAssociated" back to 0 on the first one, and it didn't make a difference. Searched again, found a second folder for my network adapter, changed "ScanWhenAssociated" to 0 on the second one, rebooted, and voila - no ping spikes!
Thanks for this excellent post.