How to Change the Priority of Network Cards and WiFi in Windows 10

Change priority of network cards (wired or WiFi) in Windows 10

The Windows 10 operating system always gives priority to wired networks over wireless WiFi networks, something completely normal because they tend to be more reliable, faster and more stable than WiFi networks. If you want to change the priority or see how you have it configured in your operating system, it is really simple, in addition, you can also configure different forms of the behavior of the network configuration.

To carry out all these configurations, you must go to Windows / Configuration, where we will see all the categories of configuration options that we have available

Once inside here, we have to click on “Network and Internet” where it will take us to the specific menu for the network configuration.

Now we must click on ” Change adapter options ” to access the advanced network settings. When we click here, it will take us directly to “Control Panel / Networks and Shares / Change adapter settings”. So this configuration can be accessed in both ways, our favorite is to go directly to the control panel, although the number of steps are exactly the same.

Once inside this menu, we will have to choose the WiFi network card that we want to prioritize or not, by default the prioritization is “Automatic” and Windows will always give priority to cable connectivity. We choose the Ethernet or WiFi network card and click on « Properties «.

Once we have clicked on “Properties” we put “Internet Protocol version 4 (TCP / IP) and click on” Properties “again:

Now we will see the configuration of the network at the IP and DNS level, now we must click on the part of «Advanced options» that we have at the bottom:

This menu is where we can configure our network adapter in an advanced way. We can add different configurations that we have and give them different types of priorities. For example, if we put a fixed IP, we have the possibility of putting different fixed IP addresses to adapt to the different networks where we are going to connect our PC, by default it is with DHCP, therefore, we will not have this functionality enabled.

Another option is the possibility of configuring the default gateway with its metric, in this way, we can register different gateways with different priorities. The gateway with the lowest metric will have the highest priority, as is often the case with routers and networking equipment.

Right at the bottom we have the option of “Automatic metric” of the network adapter, if we deselect this function and we put a specific metric, we will give priority or not to this network interface. The lower the number in the interface metric, the higher the priority of the network adapter, and the higher the number of the network adapter, the lower the priority. For example, if we put a metric 10 to this wired network adapter, and later we put a metric 5 to a wireless network adapter, the latter will be the one that has priority in the operating system.

As you have seen, it is really easy to change the priority of the network adapter through the graphical user interface, however, we also have the possibility to do it through the console with Windows PowerShell.

Change priorities with Windows PowerShell

If we want to do it with Windows PowerShell, what we have to do is open it with administrator permissions (Run as administrator):

Once inside the console, we can put the following command that will show us the priorities (metric) that the different adapters have in the “InterfaceMetric” section:

Get-NetIPInterface

If we want to change the priority of a certain adapter, we simply have to put the following:

Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceIndex INDICE -InterfaceMetric METRICA

For example:

Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceIndex 20 -InterfaceMetric 5

If we run the display command again, we can see that the changes have been applied correctly:

Get-NetIPInterface

If we want to leave it as it was with the automatic metric, we must execute the following command:

Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceIndex 21 -AutomaticMetric enabled

In this easy way and with commands, we will be changing the priority easily.

Change priority of saved WiFi networks in Windows 10

If, in addition to changing the priority of the network cards you have on your computer, you also have the possibility of changing the priority of the WiFi networks saved on your computer. In this case, what we must do is open a “cmd” console with administrator permissions:

Once inside, you will have to execute the following command to verify the different WiFi network profiles saved on your computer:

netsh wlan show profiles

The first thing we will see will be a list with all the Wi-Fi networks that we have saved in Windows 10. As we can see, the networks are ordered according to their age, with the first network we connect to being the one at the top of the list and so on. until the most recent network, the last.

To change the priority of a network we must then type the following command, entering the corresponding name of the network to modify:

netsh wlan set profileorder name="nombre_de_la_red" interface="Wi-Fi" priority=1

In this way, the network that we have chosen will have ” priority 1 “, that is, the maximum one above the others. In the case of wanting to order the priority of other networks, we can do so by modifying the name of the network and the value of the « priority » parameter by 2, 3, 4, etc.

As you have seen, it is really easy in Windows operating systems to change the priority of the WiFi networks to which we are going to connect, in this way, we can prioritize some SSIDs (WiFi profiles) over others when connecting. For example, if we have a 2.4GHz network and another 5GHz network, we can prioritize the connection to the 5GHz band network, which will normally provide us with higher performance and less interference with neighboring networks.