5930G DVD and Wifi speed issue?

Ok ... have the laptop for over a month now, works great for the most part ... flawless performance in games and most other aspects (although Vista is highly annoying with it's still slower responsiveness compared to XP).

The DVD Slimtype 8x (DS8A2S) it came with might be an issue.

To be more specific ... whenever I'm burning a DVD through Nero Lite, it's maximum burning speed is apparently 8x (11,080 KB/s) (or so it says).
Under that speed, the burning process shouldn't really take longer than about 8 minutes and 30 seconds. Nero also reports this time initially, but then reaches about 55% of the burning process, the time reaches 0 and then suddenly another 4 minutes add themselves (I know I know, software glitch if anything ... yet why is out of sync with the actual transfer rate?).
It would appear the writing time is actually just under 13 minutes for no apparent reason (and it shouldn't really be so when 8x dvd drive is concerned - I'm using dvd's of reasonable quality so the possibility of the dvd medium being responsible ... while possible is slightly lower).

Also, when I tried copying an entire DVD content onto the hdd via the standard copy/paste method in Explorer ... the file transfer was barely over 4.5 MB/s (sometimes it starts with half of that and gradually increases).
In fact, the final transfer time reaches the same time like Nero ... about 13 minutes ... but isn't that a bit slow for a 8x dvd drive?

The Wifi issue ...
I was transferring some files from my desktop to 5930G via wireless.
The transfer speed was a 'whooping' 1.5 MB/second.

On my old laptop, the wireless LAN speed would be at least 10.1 MB/s
Granted, the 5930G uses Intel Wifi 5100 (draft-N) card.
I mean, I have no issues with the transfer speeds while on the Internet ... trouble is in the internal home network.

True, my wireless router is NOT 'N' protocol capable (It's an old Gigaset SE515 router) ... so there's a possibility (at least from what I was able to gather online) I have to alter the security protocols in order to enhance the speed of my Acer Wifi card (only trouble is, which settings need to be modified?).

Btw, I use Vista Home Premium SP1 (for now).
Is it possible the OS itself is delaying the transfer speed of the DVD drive and messing up the network (I know that SP1 didn't exactly fix this issue)?
I mean, sure, it's definitely possible the drive itself has been misleadingly advertised (wouldn't be the first when any larger company is concerned), though I'd first like to explore other possibilities before going for this one (although I'm keeping it in mind).

Are these speeds relatively standard or what?