1520 (M17x-R1 dual band wireless) in M17x-R4

EDIT: ok slight change in the fact that after looking toward more drivers (newer and older) i have found i did have the 1510, however the rest remains the same. specifically listed in my m17x r1 component list as

part number: Y488R

quantity: 1

description: Card, Wireless, Half Mini-Card AW1510, 4322, United States

dont think this will be seen as i am not bumping the post but i tried the dell forums and got some help but nothing that got me anywhere. if a mod sees this and can, please change the 1520 in the title to 1510, thanks.

ORIGINAL:

Ok so this may seem odd for someone to do when they are spending the money on an Alienware system but my purchase of this system was quite unexpected. as such i needed to keep as much costs down as i could and in doing so (with some research on ensuring ports were the same) i chose to skip upgrading my wireless and got the stock intel centrino 2230 and then use the dell 1510 wireless card from my R1.


so the main problem, back when i was on my M17x R1 with the 1510 wireless card and i connected to my router from anywhere in my apartment i rarely ever dropped below 250mbps (around that number, i know there is only specific speeds it will run at but i dont recall exactly) on the 5ghz band. placing the same card into my new system i got at the end of november i rarely get over 150mbps and its often slower or jumping around. now i know 150mbps is a fine connection speed for any internet tasks but the main problem with it isnt the speed but the number of errors. the speed also drops significantly if i move to another room in my apartment, which isnt often but just one wall and then dropping over 100mbps (and only with the new laptop) seems excessive. also using the site monitor causes the errors to jump dramatically.

as of this typing my uptime was about 57 minutes and i have a recived packet loss of 380 according to the broadcom wireless utility which came with the dell driver package for the device. now the utility may be wrong and may not mean much of a loss when you look at the other stats shown (packets sent: 36600, packets recieved: 50000, total packet lost %: 0) but it still is making me looking for causes.

so what im looking for is what could be causing the problem. i have tried the broadcom/dell driver and the microsoft driver. tried making sure the intel wireless program was removed. tried checking settings in the adaptor. disabling any power saving features on the card. as for things i tried with the router; i changed its channel, rebooted, unplugging for 5 minutes, moving the router to a slightly different spot.

now the router says the N speed is up to 450, even on my r1 i never got over 300 which i was fine with and the router didnt change since my r1 dying and my r4 arriving.

only things i havnt tried is swapping the antennas (which i dont think would do anything), and a complete reinstall of windows.

if anyone has any ideas on what i could do to get the max speeds and overcome some of the errors let me know, thanks in advance.



background (only useful if your going to say 'use 2.4ghz band'): now the main reason i did this is because i live in downtown seattle in a somewhat dense apartment building where in the past any attempt at me using my previous laptops to connect to my home router would sometimes randomly disconnect or drop to 1mbps and be unable to load web pages or access anything on the web i wasnt already connected to. this happened on 2 systems i owned, my compal hel80 and my m17x r1 (before upgrading my router to have dual band). trying to figure out why i was having problems i came to the conclusion that using the 2.4ghz band in my area was pretty much pointless, there are over 30 wireless access points within range of my apartment, business and residential, add in other 2.4ghz items (wireless house phones, microwaves, bluetooth from gameconsoles, etc). with all the items in that band it was destroying my usablity of a standard connection. this was more noticable as a problem whenever my room mate would get home and turn on his wii which killed my connection instantly. some of it may have been the router we had but at the same time it still happens when i use a laptop on the 2.4ghz band on my new router.