Change the Connection Priorities in Windows 8 Laptops

Most laptops have both wireless and wired network adapters. With these two network interface cards, a laptop can be connected to any available wireless network, wired network, or both.

In most cases, you would connect your Windows 8 laptop to any one type of network (i.e. either wireless or wired network) even if you have access to both of them. Since laptops are the portable devices, your first preference would be to connect it to a wireless network.

There may also be instances where your laptop is connected to both wireless and wired network connections simultaneously. When this is the situation, you may want your laptop to treat one particular connection type as of high priority, while leaving the other one as a secondary option. For example, if your wireless network is slower compared to the wired network, and the laptop is connected to both the networks at the same time, you would obviously want the laptop to use the wired network as the first preference.

Since most laptops are configured to treat the wireless networks on priority basis, here is how you can manually change the priority of the network type that your laptop may use when it is connected to multiple networks simultaneously:

    ■Log on to the Windows 8 laptop using an administrator account.
    ■Click the Desktop tile from the Start screen.
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    ■On the desktop window, press the Windows + R keys simultaneously to open the Run command box.
    ■In the available field in the Run command box, type the NCPA.CPL command, and hit Enter.
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    ■Once you are in the Network Connections window, press the Alt key on the keyboard.
    ■From the menu bar that appears at the top, click the Advanced menu.
    ■From the displayed options, click Advanced Settings.
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    ■In the Advanced Settings box that opens up, ensure that you are on the Adapters and Bindings tab.
    ■From the Connections list available in the upper section of the interface, click to select the network adapter whose priority you want to raise. (Ethernet in this demonstration.)
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    ■Once selected, click the Up button (button with the up arrow symbol) from the right to bring the adapter to the top of the list.
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    ■Click OK from the bottom of the box to confirm the changes, and close the Network Connections window as well.
    ■Finally restart the computer to allow the changes to take effect.