WiFi card on laptop not getting full bandwidth. Other devices on network are.

Hopefully someone can give me a heads up on what's going on with my laptop. Have an older 2012 Toshiba Qosmio X875-Q7290 laptop running Windows 7 64. It has an Intel Wireless-AC 7260 installed with the latest Intel drivers. I have a 140Mbps internet connection. I downloaded a 2GB file from Gog.com to test the speed. The results are as follows:

MacBook Pro 15" late 2013 model gets 14.2 megabytes a second download speeds
2016 Lenovo laptop running Windows 8.1 gets the same as the MacBook
The Toshiba Qosmio will not go over 8.6 megabytes per second download speeds

I tested all three laptops at the same location near the cable modem/router so signal strength would be the same.

I installed a completely different 802.11ac WiFi card (AzureWave CE123H) and nothing changed.

Has anyone run into this? I have tried many different settings in the WiFi card's settings and nothing seems to help. Already scanned for viruses and malware. I am completely stumped on this one. I am about to just move over to a USB WiFi interface and give up on the internal mini PCI-e interface on this laptop.

 

Nevermind. Fresh install of Windows to another drive and it seems I am back @ 14.2MB/ps download speeds. Now I have the joy of trying to figure out what is causing this slowdown on my main SSD. I've done every virus and malware scan I can think of so the process of elimination will start I suppose.

 

That's just how it is man, most people are lucky that they get ~90% of their intended internet speed. Try ethernet, that might fix it, or move the laptop closer to your router

 

If you see my first post, location is irrelevant. I tried two different PCI-e wireless cards with the same results at the same location. It's only when I use a different hard drive with Windows 7 64 on on the same machine that the WiFi goes full speed. So what I am dealing with is something is either missing or corrupt in my Windows installation or some other piece of software or service is interfering. I'm pecking around to see if I can find the culprit before reinstalling the OS which solves it.

 

Reinstalling windows and keeping your files is relatively simple, so if that fixes it, do that.

 

Yes, I am well aware, but it is very frustrating not to know why this happened. I tried uninstalling all Windows 7 updates (including changing my .mum files that were set to "permanent" to "removable"), resetting my winsock registry entries, uninstalling possible offending applications, scanning for malware/viruses/rootkits, uninstalling and reinstalling network drivers. Nope. Nothing. It will not go over a max of 8.6MBps download speeds regardless of browser/FTP client compared to a fresh install of Windows 7 which gets the full 140Mbps bandwidth of 14MBps. Something happened in Windows at a low level to have changed this and I just can't figure out what. My OCD is not pleased.