Extreme lag in online games for Elitebook.

I was suffering extreme lag when playing RTCW: Enemy Territory online on my Elitebook 8440p over a wireless connection. At the same location, through the same router and connected to the same server I would get a ping of 25ms through Ethernet, and of 0.5-1seconds over wireless. Sometimes the wireless connection would even completely time out. I think you'll all agree using wireless should not result in a 20-40 times laggier connection than Ethernet.

To cut a very long story short, the app responsible was the Intel(R) Management Engine. As soon as I disabled it, and prevented it from loading on start-up, my wireless ping went on par with Ethernet. It took a couple of Windows 7 reinstalls, and at least 3 days of troubleshooting to figure it out. Wireless encription made no difference, as I tried WEP, WPA1-Personal and WPA2-Personal. Nothing else made a difference, including any of the other fixes for lag spikes that can be found online.

Why am I posting this? First, if anyone else is having lag issues over wireless, this may help. Second, I'd like to know exactly what is the Intel(R) Management Engine doing, and why is it affecting only the wireless connection? I know RTCW: Enemy Territory is an old game, but some people are still playing it. I also know that it uses UDP, unlike WoW which uses TCP/IP.

 

i had a similiar issue with everquest2 on the IME. it manages power consumption and it for some reason messes with the wifi speed/power, causing it to lag.

you can fix it by manually changing the settings in the wireless card itself, setting to maximum performance and suchlike.

Sio

 

Thanks for the reply. In case others are wondering, here's the quote from wikipedia as to what IME actually is:

In other words it's completely useless for non-business end users like myself. The reason it took so long to figure out that IME was causing the lag is because I had assumed whatever extra functionality it adds should equally affect Wireless and Ethernet. Why would IME try to lower Wireless power consumption in the first place? And why would it do it while the laptop is on AC? Isn't that the job of all the other HP power management utilities?

Whatever the case may be, I uninstalled IME, and only used the Intel drivers to prevent having unrecognized devices in my device manager. Now my Wireless works just fine without any lag.