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I'm using a wifi usb stick for internet and decided to try it out for some games. I noticed though that whenever my game starts up, which in turn pushes my video card to start working, my ping spikes up and even kills the wifi stick's dashboard. I'm assuming that this is a power issue. Anyone know if I can increase the power that goes into my USB port or device?

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  • the actual power going there should not be changing. I have seen some graphs where the power of a cheap PSU when the 12V rails were loaded, the 5V rail raised (of all things). it would have to be a very bad PSU to knock the 5v down below functional. are you sure this is a Cause of a power fluxuation, and not a I/O issue ? did the lights dip ? Some fat caps could be put on the usb 5v line of the correct size to keep from popping the port, and that would balance out small short spikes up or down. but there must be a way to test the theory that is it a power problem?
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Feb 19, 2012 at 11:19
  • Is it in one of the front ports or back ports? what is the claimed power consumption max of the device? A powered Hub (preferably not a cheap one) supplies its own power to the usb, and can be independant of the computers own 5V power.
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Feb 19, 2012 at 11:25
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    It's a laptop and I've tried all ports. It's a USB stick so I'd expect an iPhone to consume at least more. I just made the assumption that it might be power since I have an i7 processor and 6gb of RAM and the game isn't as much of a hog as, say Crysis.
    – Jonn
    Commented Feb 19, 2012 at 14:37
  • my first comment does Not apply to laptops.
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Feb 19, 2012 at 15:27

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Of course the PSU may be the reason but most likely it is just the CPU which is busy with the game and has too little resources left for processing the whole networking stuff the WLAN stick has off-loaded onto the CPU. In the CPU is busy it takes more CPU cycles until the networking code is executed hence it takes longer for processing incoming and outgoing packets.

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  • Could it be? I've tried closing other other apps and I've got a quadcore processor so I assumed that it wasn't the case. What else could be the cause of USB devices failing?
    – Jonn
    Commented Feb 19, 2012 at 14:39
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    I would not exclude possibilities I haven't tested. Just run CPUBurn or something similar and look how the network reacts.
    – Robert
    Commented Feb 19, 2012 at 16:45

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