You would think it would happen automatically

So here’s an interesting situation I ran into when using Windows 7, connected to both my Ethernet network and my home wireless network: whenever I transferred data between my NAS and my machine, Windows 7 had a tendency to use the wireless network instead of the Ethernet connection! This was annoying because the speed of the transfers was much slower over the wireless connection for obvious reasons.

I was a little surprised because I thought Windows would automatically figure out that the Ethernet connection was faster for this type of transfer and switch over. That wasn’t the case. So then I couldn’t resist trying to figure out a way to force Windows to use the wired connection instead of the wireless one.

In this article I will show you two methods that you can use to achieve this. Note that it may be best to combine both methods to ensure that the correct connection is used. One method involves changing the network adapter bindings and the other method involves changing the metrics on each network connection. By default, Windows uses the connection with the lowest metric value. For whatever reason, the Ethernet connection may not end up with a lower metric value, so you can manually change it.