Uhm... your Wifi card is not integrated in your machine, but is connected via USB, right? You say that when you use some big CPU-consuming applications, it seems that your machine isn't capable of maintaining a good wifi connection... this seems to mean
(unless the radiations of the CPU running at full speed disturb the wifi signal, but this seems to me very unlikely) that it cannot continue using the full speed of the USB port...
A similar thing happens to me (I have an old PC): when I print, if I do other CPU-consuming tasks, I the printer slows down.
The best thing would be to use the network cable, if you can. But if you cannot, let's see some thing you may try. Remember that they are only ideas, no effectiveness warranty!
- Update your USB drivers (check on your computer manufacturer's site. Unlikely, but sometimes there are such updates available.)
- Update your Wifi NIC drivers (check on its manufacturer's site)
- Try to use the task manager to give an higher priority to the process that controls the Wifi Card (even if probably the bottleneck is elsewhere, maybe in a system process, I don't know.)
- Try to use the task manager to give a lower priority to the OpenArena process
- Try to set a lower com_maxfps value (together with lower quality settings) in OpenArena, to prevent it from using 100% CPU. See also
here.
- Try to force the Wifi card to use a lower speed, for example 11 Mbits. Who knows, maybe it could be more stable.