I have a HP EliteBook 8540W and I had connection drops and really high pings (to an internet website or a local device) or timeouts with the newest driver on Windows 7. Or when I downloading something big the connection drops for a few seconds and then goes back downloading, and so on. So I rolled back the driver to the default Windows 7 driver from 2010... after that no problems.
So i'm using Windows 8 for over a year now. With the default driver:
Driver Provider: Microsoft Corporation
Driver Date: 7-10-2011
Driver Version: 14.2.1.3
Without any problems. Can download to the max without any connection drops on 2 or 5 GHz...
But sometime today I did an Windows Update... and the system decided to update my Intel Wifi Centrino Ultimate N6300 AGN... so I did not noticed it because at work I use a LAN cable. So when I got home I tried to move some stuff from my USB to my NAS. And I got frustrated because it just went so slow and I opened up a CMD windows and did a ping -t for a website and a local device... lots of timeouts and connections drops... really high pings...
So I was thinking I did installed a lot of updates so I checked the driver... and voila some driver of Intel from august 2013. I did a roll back to the above default Windows 8 driver and presto no more problems.
I have this problem for years. And it is the new driver of Intel itself, the 'stock' driver from Windows never gave me any problems.
They should just compare those two. Why should a driver which is over 2 years old work better than the latest Intel Driver ?
And don't give me this crap regarding the 'newest' wireless router with the latest firmware, because I am myself an IT engineer with many years experience (don't get me wrong I still can learn new things) and with the Windows 7 setup I have had almost every wireless router you can think of (because I thought that was the issue) like the 'famous' Linksys E4200. And I played around with 'dd-wrt' software also. Did not made a difference.
After a lot of wireless routers (easy for me to test any wireless router, because I could take and test router from my work, as we have a lot of different wireless routers in stock) I finally bought the D-Link DIR-855 Xtreme-N Duo Media Router. Still the same problems... then reverting back to the stock Windows drivers... problem solved.
I even put the E4200 back as a test and that gave me also excellent speed, though I did kept the D-Link and now I got a wireless speed of 125 Mbps (yes 15,5 mb/s download.. ;-)) continuously without any drops....
So my opinion... Intel = buggy drivers keep with stock if you have any problems.
It's Intel's business to sort this out...