e4300 slow wireless

I know I don't have the greatest wireless card, the dell 1397. my GFs macbook which is 3 years old smokes my latitude in terms of wireless speed. I tried the latest drivers and that made things worse.

any suggestions? is there any setting? also when I had the e4200 was not that fast either and reception was OK. it had the intel card. so it might be that the intel cards are not the best.

what should I do? any settings to check? or should I get a new wireless card?

thanks

 

Check your router settings? Intel has some of the best wireless cards on the market, my 4965 AGN and my 5100 AGN easily get 25 mb/sec on speedtest with the FiOS G router..

 

It will probably help to reinstall your OS, as well as get an Intel WiFi card. However, chances that the difference will be noticeable outside of testing is fairly small. Under normal use, the Dell Wireless card should be sufficient.

If the speed difference is that significant, you're either on the edge of going out of range (which an Intel card will help, as those have better range), or there's a connection problem with the antennas.

 

I also agree that the Intel cards are among the best and would be wary of the Dell-branded card.

There are numerous options accessible through the card properties in Device Manager. While these should not normally need tweaking, they may well be worth studying. For example, over-aggressive power management may cause a poor connection.

John

 

I think Dell just rebrands Atheros, Realtek, and Broadcomm wireless cards. Some are good, most are so-so, some are bad.

 

i have tried a couple of settings. but anyways now I am dealing with the dell card 1397, the laptop with the intel card is gone, i should have said that. not always the dell/broadcom cards are crappy. i had a 1510 and it worked great.

 

Did you check that the antenna cables are securely fixed to the wireless card?

John

 

yes they are. and the funny thing is that with the latest drivers the card is even slower. i am gonna call dell.

 

Have you tried a known good wifi card that works? Dells do not whitelist wifi cards. Could be yours is genuinely defective.

 

might be. just got off the chat with dell. they are sending me an intel 5100 replacement! yeah! I love dell business tech support and their warranty!