Connecting to a wireless network in Windows 7 is pretty much simple and straightforward compared to the days of Windows XP and earlier operating systems. However if you have more than one wireless network available at your home or workplace, you might want to assign priority to these networks to tell your windows to which it should try to connect first. Al though you can choose to a wireless networks from all of the available wireless networks that appear under the network icon in the taskbar, it would be better if your computer connects to your favored networks automatically. This tutorial explains how you can change the priority or order of wireless networks in Windows 7.
Steps:
1. Open the Network and Sharing Center either from link in the network icon in the taskbar or from Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center
Click on the “Manage wireless networks” link found on the left-hand side pane.
2. In the Manage wireless networks window, right-click on the wireless network for which you want to change priority and you can either move it up (giving more priority) or move it down (lesser priority) depending on your usage.
3. Now the order of preference of the wireless networks used by your Windows will be changed.
You are now done with setting up the priority order for your wireless networks. So from now on, Windows will try to connect to the first one wireless network in the priority list. If it isn’t available, then it will try the next connection and so on. You can also change the settings to not connect to a particular wireless connection automatically.
If you are looking to change the order of priority among the various wired and wireless network cards on your computer, read our popular post on changing the network cards priority order in Windows.
Thanks for the post. I was having trouble with my computer disconnecting from networks to connect to higher priority networks (that shouldn’t have been). This solved it.