Can I use two wireless adapters in the same PC

What are you trying to accomplish?

only one would be used for browsing.

I want to see if two is better than one?

If you were connecting to two different routers and had a balancer then maybe. Its not worth the effort. If you got a low wifi signal then get a repeater

I am plagued by the slow downloading speed of my wireless connection to the internet. Since it is not an option to hardwire my pc, I decided to see if I can benefit by purchasing a new adapter. I am using www.speedtest.net to test the download speed on my pc using asus wireless adapters. When I use just one N13 (older Asus) I get around 2-7 mbps. When I use the newer N53 (new Asus) I get around 4-7 mbps. When I use them both, I get 6-13 mbps. I could be wrong, only relying on speedtest.net results, but it is helping. Now, I was told at the computer store that I cannot use two wireless adapters. But I am not seeing any troubles so far. It is just so much faster now.

Unless you want redundancy it's pretty useless

Yes, you can have multiple wired or wireless network connections but, in my experience with Windows 8.1, you have to connect manually the second wifi network each time the PC restart. By the way, for the others posters, I don't see why is relevant what he/she is trying to accomplish. Maybe is just for the sake of curiosity. But if you wonder, there useful scenarios like:
1) One connection for internet and the other for sharing files in a private (isolated) network.
2) One network adapter for a virtual machine and other network adapter for the host (without sharing the bandwidth).
3) One internet connection for downloading torrents (using binding) and another connection for browsing (modifying metrics).

Connecting two wireless adapters to the same computer will not improve the system's Internet connection speed. Adding a second Wi-Fi adapter to a computer will improve the Wi-Fi performance if the second adapter features a better-performing standard, but it's overriding the older, slower card, not working in conjunction with it. The Internet connection speed is usually bottlenecked at the service provider level and the Wi-Fi connection has enough bandwidth to support all of the available Internet speed.

Actually I am testing as we speak.
Scenario Home Office with a Personal network and a business network.
One User connects to Business and one to Personal.
That way i can switch back and forth, also it allows me to run carbonite without pop ups saying drive not connected.
Just started, minor problems. One internal wifi and one USB adapter.

Back in the day in widows xp you could use multilink protocol to have two nic cards. I tested this once where one nic card transmitted the data and the other was just used as the receiver and I/O was much greater than before. Not sure if windows 7/8 supports this anymore because of how much faster everything is today vs back in the day and removed the ability to do. When a computer has more than one nic card/wifi card it is called a multihomed pc and many times this is not allowed on corporate network. But of course I am sure this is just fine in a home environment.

I will investigate this myself and see if I can use my N WIFI card to transmit and use the second AC wifi card to receive. I am sure it is possible but not sure if my windows 8.1 will allow me to do so. Also I do not think games like world of warcraft would like such a setup as WARDEN might ban you.

abc1232 said:

I want to see if two is better than one?

I have a Sony Vaio laptop with a Qualcomm card. I added a USB wifi adapter and it seems to be happily using both. I haven't had a chance to test performance difference much yet, but there is no conflict or other problem. Running Win 8.1. Both show connected to internet. Both using same network.
Internet speed is much faster subjectively. I haven't run an actual benchmark, but I am getting page loads and mp3 downloads seem much, much better than what I experienced before without the adapter or with the adapter alone.

Hector Roman said:

Yes, you can have multiple wired or wireless network connections but, in my experience with Windows 8.1, you have to connect manually the second wifi network each time the PC restart. By the way, for the others posters, I don't see why is relevant what he/she is trying to accomplish. Maybe is just for the sake of curiosity. But if you wonder, there useful scenarios like:
1) One connection for internet and the other for sharing files in a private (isolated) network.
2) One network adapter for a virtual machine and other network adapter for the host (without sharing the bandwidth).
3) One internet connection for downloading torrents (using binding) and another connection for browsing (modifying metrics).

Thanks very helpful !

OK, so this is a hot mess.

First of all, a NIC or "Network Interface Controller" is not the same thing as a WiFi Adapter. A "NIC" is for Ethernet hard wired connections. At least that's how I was raised.

If your router has two WiFi radios, like mine which has a 5.0GHz radio and a 2.4GHz radio, there's no reason why you can't communicate to your router using both at the same time.

With Windows 7, I had both a 5.0GHz WiFi adapter and a 2.4GHz WiFi adapter and they'd both connect automatically on Start-Up, however, Windows 10 seems to select the 5GHz adapter and auto-connect to that one alone. I can manually connect the 2.4GHz adapter and both will work at the same time and there is traffic on both at certain occasions. Primarily, the most traffic is on the High-Speed 5.0GHz internal card WiFi adapter, but Win 10 will use the USB 2.4GHz adapter once in a while. I can watch the traffic in Task Manager but I can't figure out what exactly Windows is doing on the 2.4GHz adapter.

Uploading a YouTube video results in traffic on the 5.0GHz adapter. Also, downloading is done via the 5.0GHz but every now and then, there is a flare-up of traffic on the 2.4GHz, such as when opening up the "Network" folder.

I could probably spend more time on this matter and get some stuff figured out, but in my opinion, there's probably some bandwidth and speed gain by using two radio links at the same time, although probably negligible. If you have a Dual-band Router / Access Point and already own both 5.0GHz and 2.4GHz WiFi adapters, you may as well get 'em both into the action. I just wouldn't run out and spend much money on a 2nd WiFi adapter until the benefit is better substantiated.

Hotspot not working

Weird. I have two AC wireless adapters and an Ethernet with AC (Asus cell spot AC router) when I plug in both usb adapters and try to connect to each of the same networks (,5GHz channel) one will drop off and say not connected as soon as the other one connects and vice versa. So. What if any benefit would I have in connecting the two to the same 5GHz channel and how would I do it without them fighting each other and disconnecting each other once the other takes over the network? Do I need a bridge? Would it speed anything up at all? Any benefit to two adapters even? Should I keep the best one and just sell the other? Any help greatly appreciated. Just curious.

wisloc said:

I am plagued by the slow downloading speed of my wireless connection to the internet. Since it is not an option to hardwire my pc, I decided to see if I can benefit by purchasing a new adapter. I am using www.speedtest.net to test the download speed on my pc using asus wireless adapters. When I use just one N13 (older Asus) I get around 2-7 mbps. When I use the newer N53 (new Asus) I get around 4-7 mbps. When I use them both, I get 6-13 mbps. I could be wrong, only relying on speedtest.net results, but it is helping. Now, I was told at the computer store that I cannot use two wireless adapters. But I am not seeing any troubles so far. It is just so much faster now.

Simply not possible that using two is increasing your speed without other equipment.

The answer is yes. I am doing this right now. As previous posters state, it will not speed anything up.

I use a 5ghz network adapter to connect to my 5ghz router for internet

I use a 2.4ghz network adapter to connect to my wifi printer (not 5ghz compatible) so I can scan from the printer (printing works fine connected via 5ghz, not scanning for whatever reason)

With it set up this way I get the benefits of 5ghz connectivity and the use of all of my printer functions.

usn020702 said:

The answer is yes. I am doing this right now. As previous posters state, it will not speed anything up.

I use a 5ghz network adapter to connect to my 5ghz router for internet

I use a 2.4ghz network adapter to connect to my wifi printer (not 5ghz compatible) so I can scan from the printer (printing works fine connected via 5ghz, not scanning for whatever reason)

With it set up this way I get the benefits of 5ghz connectivity and the use of all of my printer functions.

Thank you. I'm now doing something similar with my 2.4/5GHz. I was curious if they could also be ganged up to make a better connection but they're not the access points or router so that's a no. I guess it's repeater or booster time. I have an AC Wi-Fi compatible router but I do live in an old house and the connection from the office to the living room and bedroom has to go through about 3 or 4 really old plaster walls which make the connection pretty crappy so it's time to put something at the halfway point that will extend the range but I'm trying to do it on the cheap and not having much success by using old routers and things like that so I might just come up a little bit of dough and go out and just buy a decent one that will support AC Wi-Fi as well thanks for your answer :-) much appreciated

I wanted good wifi coverage in my backyard for airplay functionality and ended up running two of the same routers with the exact ssid and password (make sure they're on different channels) so I automatically connect to whichever one has the stronger signal. It works awesome for me. I experimented with extenders and just wasn't happy with the performance.