How to change from 2.4GHz to 5GHz
# How to Change Your Preferred Wi-Fi Band to 5 GHz in Windows 10
In this guide, we’ll show you how to change your preferred Wi-Fi band from 2.4 GHz to 5 GHz on a Windows 10 or any other Windows computer. Whether you’re using a built-in Wi-Fi adapter or an external USB device, this step-by-step guide will help you force your device to connect to the 5 GHz band for faster and more stable connections.
---
## Step 1: Check if Your Device Supports 5 GHz
Before proceeding, it’s crucial to ensure that your Wi-Fi adapter is compatible with the 5 GHz band. Here’s how you can check:
1. Open Command Prompt on your Windows computer.
2. Type the following command and press Enter:
```
ping -t
```
3. Look for the "64-bit" section in the output. If you see "AC" or "N" listed under "Radio Types Supported," your adapter supports 5 GHz.
If you’re unsure whether your device supports 5 GHz, you can refer to the specifications of your Wi-Fi adapter or check the manufacturer’s website for confirmation.
---
## Step 2: Access Device Manager
Once you’ve confirmed that your device is compatible with 5 GHz, follow these steps to modify the settings:
1. Right-click on the **Start** button (located in the bottom-left corner of your screen).
2. Select **Device Manager** from the context menu.
3. Expand the **Network adapters** section in the Device Manager window.
4. Locate your Wi-Fi adapter in the list (it could be a built-in adapter or an external USB device, depending on your setup).
---
## Step 3: Modify Adapter Settings
1. Right-click on your Wi-Fi adapter and select **Properties**.
2. Navigate to the **Advanced** tab.
3. Look for settings related to **5 GHz band support**, such as:
- **VHT 2.4 G**: This setting forces the adapter to disable the 2.4 GHz band. Unchecking this option will prioritize the 5 GHz band.
- **Preferred Band**: If your driver supports this setting, you can explicitly choose to prefer the 5 GHz band.
For example, on a Realtek-based Wi-Fi adapter, you may see an option like **VHT 2.4 G**. Unchecking this box will disable the 2.4 GHz band and force the adapter to use 5 GHz.
---
## Step 4: Adjust Router Settings (Optional)
If your router supports both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, you can further optimize your connection by modifying its settings:
1. Open a web browser and type your router’s IP address (e.g., `192.168.0.1`) into the address bar.
2. Log in to your router’s admin panel using your username and password.
3. Navigate to **Wireless Settings** or **Advanced Settings**.
4. Look for options related to **Wireless Frequency**:
- If you want to force your router to use only 5 GHz, disable the option for 2.4 GHz.
---
## Step 5: Fine-Tune Wi-Fi Channel Selection
To ensure optimal performance on the 5 GHz band, consider using a Wi-Fi analyzer app (available for both iOS and Android) to identify the least congested channel in your area. Adjust your router’s channel settings accordingly to avoid interference from neighboring devices.
---
## Important Notes
- **Signal Strength**: If you’re in an area with weak 5 GHz signal coverage, forcing your device to use this band may result in slower speeds or connectivity issues. It’s generally better to let the system automatically choose the best available band for optimal performance.
- **Driver Updates**: Ensure that your Wi-Fi adapter drivers are up-to-date. Outdated drivers can cause compatibility issues and limit 5 GHz functionality.
---
## Conclusion
By following these steps, you can force your Windows 10 computer to prioritize the 5 GHz band for Wi-Fi connections. Remember to always test your setup after making changes to ensure everything works as expected. If you have any questions or run into issues, feel free to leave a comment below!
Thank you for watching and reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more tech tips and tutorials. Until next time, stay connected and have a great weekend!
---
*Note: This guide is based on the transcription provided and assumes standard Windows 10 settings. Results may vary depending on hardware and software configurations.*
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat you guys good another video here for you in this one we're going to be taking a look at how we can change our preferred Wi-Fi band in Windows 10 or any other type of Windows computer really it's basically wanted to change it to 5 gigahertz now if you've got a Wi-Fi adapter and you're running 2.4 gigahertz I think someone mentioned it in the comment section the other day when I did a Wi-Fi video they wanted to know how to force change it to 5 gigahertz so this go ahead and take a look at how we can do that now first you need to make sure that your computer is compatible with the 5 gigahertz now I've already done a video on that so I'm going to just quickly show you here not going to go into too much detail if you want to see this video then check a couple of days ago and you'll see it there but basically open up your command prompt and just type this command in and it will give you the information on your Wi-Fi adapter you should see here the radio types supported and if you've seen the generations on here like AC you know you're going to have the 5 gigahertz supported there and even the likes of a generation n should support those so now we know that the Wi-Fi adapter does support it what you want to do is go down to the start button here right click on this and we want to go to device manager here open up the device manager and from here what you want to do is go down to where it says network adapters open this little window up here and you should see now your your Wi-Fi adapter all your Wireless that that's all wherever is you're using on your laptop or whether it be a USB type like this one now what you need to do here is a right-click on this one and go to properties and from here you want to go to where it says advanced inside the advanced you're going to get a bunch of settings inside here be careful when you're playing around with these because you don't to miss up you or Wi-Fi adapter you have to reset it but basically what you're looking for is a setting that allows you just to enable the five gigahertz and as you can see here on this adapter which is the realtek type driver based adapter here you will see this one here which says vh t 2.4 g and that is enabled if you want to force it you could actually disable this and this will enforce it to 5g now once it's made those changes it will shut down and you will need to go back into properties then back into the Advanced tab here now we need to go back into oneness mode now and check that out on the wireless mode you want to look on the drop-down and you can see here on the drop down there's a bunch of different settings here we can change now if you want to force it you can go into the AC mode here and force it to only use that value so it's only going to use this AC value and none of the others so the problem with doing this is if you're going to struggle to connect to 5g and you do only force it to the AC recommended value here then you may have trouble connecting so just be careful when you're doing this okay that's why they leave this on auto so it will find the most strongest connection and connect to it and it will use all of the values here to connect to so just bear that in mind okay but if you do want to force it you can force it to AC another thing you may see here is preferred band now depending on what type of driver you're using some of the driver ones will have preferred band and I'll show you an image of what that looks like on the screen right now and if you are using the pervert preferred band you can just change that to 5 gigahertz and then you should be forced that adapter to use 5 gigahertz so that's another thing you can do it doesn't list it on this Realtek 8h one for a you wireless LAN adapter here it doesn't show it on here but this is the way you can do here and there's a bunch of other settings which we're not going to go into in this video but basically what you're looking for here is is the actual mode heat and cv HT 2.4 G we've disabled that and also going into the other one now what you need to do once you've done all this stuff if you've got preferred mode ear and enable that and also the bandwidth you may see something saying bandwidth as well you can go in there and change the bandwidth also another thing you can do is go into your router and type in your route sir to connect to it so you can see here mine is 192.168.0.1 you then need to put in your password and username to look into your interface here once you're inside here you will be able to go to the Advanced Settings and you should now see why let's click on the wireless button here your menu may look different to mine but you just need to go to the old wireless settings here and then going to your wireless signal settings from there and you should be okay so just check those so wireless signal got to go into wireless signal here inside your wireless signal you can see here we have wireless frequency 2.4 G now if you don't want to run 2.4 G and you want to force it to use only 5 G then obviously you can put the tick inside D disable 2.4 G and this will force it to only use 5 G and that's basically how you can also force it to only use 5 G on your Wi-Fi adapter now again I can't stress enough that if you've got issues and it and it's not a very strong signal you may run into problems so it's always best to leave both but if you do want to force it that's basically how you can force it to only use 5 G another thing you can do here as you can see wireless mode you can mess around with the wireless here and you can see it's going to be forcing this now as to use a n and a C and this is a mixture of the values that you're asking it to connect to and you can see the enable 5g will use a bunch of these different ones depending on what's the strongest now if you want to force it even further you can do by just using the AC if that's what you want to do you can force it to use that sort of technology and that will obviously be what it's going to connect to again you could run into difficulties when you do that another thing here you'll see these are grayed out and it don't matter what you do here it's grayed out here so what you're going to need to do I think if we disable this smart Wi-Fi it will allow you to now take control of what you want to do so you can see here we do have 20 megahertz 20 to 40 megahertz or 20 to 40 to 80 megahertz depending on what you want to do you want to connect to then that is the best thing I would probably put it up to this one if I was forcing it to go to AC here and that way you're going to force it to stay on the higher ones here as well also you've got the channels here and this is another thing you can do if you get income sort of a confliction on the channel that you're using maybe a lot of other people are using that channel in your area you can get an app for your phone and it will look at your Wi-Fi and it will tell you what channels are really really busy and what you want to do is use a channel which is not as busy as your neighbors so for instance if you've got a lot of people in your local area that are using the Wi-Fi and they're very close to you then you may want to change the channel to something that they aren't using and that way you'll get full control of that channel for yourself and everyone else will be using the busy Channel which will slow things down so that's another thing you can do there anyway that's basically how you can forced your 5 gigahertz connection on your gene or on your laptop and that's basically how you can force that adapter to connect to 5g now obviously just bearing in mind that you always want to try to connect to the most stable and fastest one possible but sometimes just putting it onto a forcing it to 5g isn't always going to be the fastest so just bear that in mind anyway hope this one answers all your questions my name is Brian from beretta Computers code oh okay thanks again for watching guys and thanks to your continued support have a great weekend and I shall see you again for another video real soon bye for now now if you haven't subscribed yet hit the big red subscribe button on my youtube channel and hit the bell notification bar next to that to be notified when we upload new videoswhat you guys good another video here for you in this one we're going to be taking a look at how we can change our preferred Wi-Fi band in Windows 10 or any other type of Windows computer really it's basically wanted to change it to 5 gigahertz now if you've got a Wi-Fi adapter and you're running 2.4 gigahertz I think someone mentioned it in the comment section the other day when I did a Wi-Fi video they wanted to know how to force change it to 5 gigahertz so this go ahead and take a look at how we can do that now first you need to make sure that your computer is compatible with the 5 gigahertz now I've already done a video on that so I'm going to just quickly show you here not going to go into too much detail if you want to see this video then check a couple of days ago and you'll see it there but basically open up your command prompt and just type this command in and it will give you the information on your Wi-Fi adapter you should see here the radio types supported and if you've seen the generations on here like AC you know you're going to have the 5 gigahertz supported there and even the likes of a generation n should support those so now we know that the Wi-Fi adapter does support it what you want to do is go down to the start button here right click on this and we want to go to device manager here open up the device manager and from here what you want to do is go down to where it says network adapters open this little window up here and you should see now your your Wi-Fi adapter all your Wireless that that's all wherever is you're using on your laptop or whether it be a USB type like this one now what you need to do here is a right-click on this one and go to properties and from here you want to go to where it says advanced inside the advanced you're going to get a bunch of settings inside here be careful when you're playing around with these because you don't to miss up you or Wi-Fi adapter you have to reset it but basically what you're looking for is a setting that allows you just to enable the five gigahertz and as you can see here on this adapter which is the realtek type driver based adapter here you will see this one here which says vh t 2.4 g and that is enabled if you want to force it you could actually disable this and this will enforce it to 5g now once it's made those changes it will shut down and you will need to go back into properties then back into the Advanced tab here now we need to go back into oneness mode now and check that out on the wireless mode you want to look on the drop-down and you can see here on the drop down there's a bunch of different settings here we can change now if you want to force it you can go into the AC mode here and force it to only use that value so it's only going to use this AC value and none of the others so the problem with doing this is if you're going to struggle to connect to 5g and you do only force it to the AC recommended value here then you may have trouble connecting so just be careful when you're doing this okay that's why they leave this on auto so it will find the most strongest connection and connect to it and it will use all of the values here to connect to so just bear that in mind okay but if you do want to force it you can force it to AC another thing you may see here is preferred band now depending on what type of driver you're using some of the driver ones will have preferred band and I'll show you an image of what that looks like on the screen right now and if you are using the pervert preferred band you can just change that to 5 gigahertz and then you should be forced that adapter to use 5 gigahertz so that's another thing you can do it doesn't list it on this Realtek 8h one for a you wireless LAN adapter here it doesn't show it on here but this is the way you can do here and there's a bunch of other settings which we're not going to go into in this video but basically what you're looking for here is is the actual mode heat and cv HT 2.4 G we've disabled that and also going into the other one now what you need to do once you've done all this stuff if you've got preferred mode ear and enable that and also the bandwidth you may see something saying bandwidth as well you can go in there and change the bandwidth also another thing you can do is go into your router and type in your route sir to connect to it so you can see here mine is 192.168.0.1 you then need to put in your password and username to look into your interface here once you're inside here you will be able to go to the Advanced Settings and you should now see why let's click on the wireless button here your menu may look different to mine but you just need to go to the old wireless settings here and then going to your wireless signal settings from there and you should be okay so just check those so wireless signal got to go into wireless signal here inside your wireless signal you can see here we have wireless frequency 2.4 G now if you don't want to run 2.4 G and you want to force it to use only 5 G then obviously you can put the tick inside D disable 2.4 G and this will force it to only use 5 G and that's basically how you can also force it to only use 5 G on your Wi-Fi adapter now again I can't stress enough that if you've got issues and it and it's not a very strong signal you may run into problems so it's always best to leave both but if you do want to force it that's basically how you can force it to only use 5 G another thing you can do here as you can see wireless mode you can mess around with the wireless here and you can see it's going to be forcing this now as to use a n and a C and this is a mixture of the values that you're asking it to connect to and you can see the enable 5g will use a bunch of these different ones depending on what's the strongest now if you want to force it even further you can do by just using the AC if that's what you want to do you can force it to use that sort of technology and that will obviously be what it's going to connect to again you could run into difficulties when you do that another thing here you'll see these are grayed out and it don't matter what you do here it's grayed out here so what you're going to need to do I think if we disable this smart Wi-Fi it will allow you to now take control of what you want to do so you can see here we do have 20 megahertz 20 to 40 megahertz or 20 to 40 to 80 megahertz depending on what you want to do you want to connect to then that is the best thing I would probably put it up to this one if I was forcing it to go to AC here and that way you're going to force it to stay on the higher ones here as well also you've got the channels here and this is another thing you can do if you get income sort of a confliction on the channel that you're using maybe a lot of other people are using that channel in your area you can get an app for your phone and it will look at your Wi-Fi and it will tell you what channels are really really busy and what you want to do is use a channel which is not as busy as your neighbors so for instance if you've got a lot of people in your local area that are using the Wi-Fi and they're very close to you then you may want to change the channel to something that they aren't using and that way you'll get full control of that channel for yourself and everyone else will be using the busy Channel which will slow things down so that's another thing you can do there anyway that's basically how you can forced your 5 gigahertz connection on your gene or on your laptop and that's basically how you can force that adapter to connect to 5g now obviously just bearing in mind that you always want to try to connect to the most stable and fastest one possible but sometimes just putting it onto a forcing it to 5g isn't always going to be the fastest so just bear that in mind anyway hope this one answers all your questions my name is Brian from beretta Computers code oh okay thanks again for watching guys and thanks to your continued support have a great weekend and I shall see you again for another video real soon bye for now now if you haven't subscribed yet hit the big red subscribe button on my youtube channel and hit the bell notification bar next to that to be notified when we upload new videos\n"