have you tried the Win7 driver in Win10? I think it is hardware related too, but not the hardware itself. I do believe its something with the drivers. Try older ones, beta ones, hell try some hacked ones LOL GL with this, and btw. I used your test site and same settings, all the same within margin to each other. WinXP/7/8.1/10. No discernible difference between the DL or UL speeds.
@EFA11 - I can't try using the same driver on the two wifi cards, since one is an Intel 5100 and the other is an Atheros AR9485. But I will try using different drivers with the Atheros, it's worth a shot. I just hope Windows 10 plays nice and let's me install them. Thanks for testing WinXP/7/8.1/10 on the same site I'm using. If you found no difference between any of them, that reinforces my belief that it's the hardware itself. Maybe HP uses a crappy wifi antenna compared to the Lenovo, or by using the Atheros card.
Man, you might find weird ... silly ... okay. I also did no believe. In an old work of mine, an employee reported that after upgrading to Windows 7 the operation of a particular site had been slower! I said, but that does not make any sense ... the site works with ASP, the response time is determined by the server and not by the application. So, I thought. We made several tests ... there we had 7 machines in the room, all connected to the same switch. Two of them was using Windows 7, and the other XP. And really, the machines used Windows XP received faster response website. About 1 minute less! It was a health insurance site. But it happens a little before I left the company, I did not have time to investigate seriously. But it was something that made me very curious. TL; DR: No, it does not help you at all. It's just a story, a curiosity! cheers
Some newer mobile wireless adapters are indeed worse than older models because they are made to be more energy efficient on ultrabooks. .321 aren't the latest Atheros drivers. If you check microsot update catalog (via IE) there are newer drivers for the same chipset supplied by other laptop makers (at least >=.340) or on station-drivers. Luckily there might be some difference. I have some older atheros based adapters than can vary performance a lot depending on driver branch. The 2x2 AR946x on a low power laptop is indeed very weak on range vs performance when compared to some older laptops with Intel adapters I've used in the past, the best of them with that same 5100 (antennas should count a lot, of course). Remember to test speeds on your laptop plugged in, and without a conservative Power plan (use balanced or high performance), also check in the advanced tab of your atheros drivers that the smart mimo mode is disabled (nvm, it's a 1x1, doesn't apply to your adapter). Edit: Also, that AR4685 sucks for transfers. It's a "green" low power 1x1, unlike your older 1x2 Intel adapter. You should struggle to go above 40Mbps file transfers even on top of your router unless on 40Hz to have a slight boost.
In admin cmd, try : netsh int tcp set global autotuning=restricted netsh int tcp set global chimney=enabled Then reboot.
Anyway the most obvious thing to do to exclude any OS problem is to install W10 and W7 side by side adding a VHD[x] with the missing OS to both machines, to compare Apples with Apples
Are you also monitoring other bandwidth usage while this test is being run? Windows 10 uses a lot of bandwidth - Windows Update, telemetry, apps with live tiles, Cortana... the actual amount of data being consumed by these is not the only thing that matters; the very fact that these processes are accessing the internet can bring down the throughput on your test download. Try bringing up task manager and killing the BITS service.
As an alternative to inssider, you can also use wirelessnetview. It's a much simpler/portable and free tool. Beware not to test while these programs are running, because they can bog down wifi due to their constant scanning. If power is enough, a card like your 1x2 intel should have a signal with higher quality because it can cancel noise from the two separate antenna signals, unlike your 1x1 atheros card that doesn't allow mimo mode. This doesn't mean a 1x1 card is bad per se, AR9271 usb based adapters (so as the usual Ralink and Realtek suspects) have fantastic reception because they don't have ultrabook power efficiency in mind. Btw, if you look for a maintenance manual on you HP laptop, it should have the whitelisted Wifi adapters on your bios (by HP part number). Then it could be possible to upgrade you wifi to a better adapter (albeit less energy efficient) if it's offered on other model variants.
I don't recommend this tool currently, for whatever reason within a few days of use, every time, DHCP totally fails on all adapters on my computer, tried fresh install and windows restore fixes it, tried multiple times, don't know if it is just me or not.. but I'm on Enterprise 1607. All backups in the tool and all other methods of resetting fails, windows cannot identify the problem but no connectivity you get 169 address and cannot communicate with router either, even new adapters. Only system restore fixed. (happened before and after upgrade with TCP-Optimizer)
LOL Noob OS does not suq user suqs and cannot configure OS lol windows has most tweak option in world to configure net connection. Make sure your nic is running full duplex that is the biggest tweak. LOL installing os to get 10 more mbps on wireless router..... the internet never ceases to be amusing............ man in the past they would answer this with just PEBKAC the old ways were the best ways all this noob pandering just makes the problem worse but more amusement too I suppose. Go read ALL of speedguide.net and broadband reports like everyone else did 15 years ago.....
The only thing that can MAYBE speed up your internet is TCP Fast Open + DNS Caching especially if you have LTE cellular.