pc wifi antenna randomly becomes faulty and affects phone wifi as well
so i know how to fix the issue, i just cant understand why it happens in the first place. its happened twice so far since october 2025 when i first bought this pc. starting from the first event, all of the sudden one day a couple months ago, the wifi started dropping to 3 bars before going back up to 4. it made the internet largely unusable, and i tried updating drivers until i realized that my phone also had dropped to 3 bars. i just assumed the wifi itself had the problem since it was my phone too. after a couple days i randomly decided to move around my wifi antenna and what do you know, problem solved. i just assumed i had knocked it out of place. it was probably the first thing i should have thought to try, but it is my first time owning a desktop and not a laptop, so please give me grace.
the next and most recent time it happened, i also assumed it was just a wifi issue again, since my roommate had been streaming and used a lot of bandwidth. same exact issues as before. wifi going between 3 and 4 bars on both my pc and my phone. after she was done streaming and the problem persisted i thought to try messing with the antenna again. i moved it around quite a bit but it would only shift between 3 and 2 bars now, so i held it in the air for a moment and the problem resolved, and didn't begin again after setting it back down in the same position i had just had it. i know for a fact though it had not been moved or knocked around since i had been sitting at my computer and actively was using it when the problem began.
so. i know how to fix the problem, i just want to know why, and how the antenna having issues also affects my phone. i understand the very basics of how wifi works, but the antenna doesn't usually affect my phone so i'm not sure why the signal would then. any super smart tech people know whats up?