Dell Wlan 390 - connects at 54mbps, falls to 1mbps

Hi,

I've got to contact Dell about my failing screen / graphics card (intermittent appearance of various sparkling pixels in vertical stripes), but I also seem to be having a problem with my wifi, and I'd like to have some idea of how I discuss the issue with Tech Support:

When I boot up my Vostro 1500, it goes through the BIOS and initial WinXP load very quickly.
It then shows my desktop wallpaper and pauses for up to a minute,
I check the Event Viewer, and this suggests the delay occurs/coincides with CEOP (in the Application events) and TCP/IP (in the Hardware events, iirc)
Eventually the desktop icons appear, and the processes load into the System Notification area (bottom right of screen) very quickly.

And then I try to browse the web.

It tends to start off fine, showing speeds of up to 54mbps, but often falls down to the horrid, unusable speeds of 11, 5 or even 1mbps. During all this time the connection meter has shown 'green' with 5 bars filled. Occasionally it drops to 4, and I've had two other 'events': one where it went yellow at 3, and one where my daughter showed me it dropped the connection altogether.

This is all happening with the laptop running off the power supply.
I've loaded the latest set of 390 drivers from the uk website, but that hasn't helped, in fact the problem is getting worse.
I was wondering if my screen problem was causing interference with the signal, but the connection speed drops even when the screen is working properly.

The wifi is being driven by a Speedtouch 585v6 upstairs. My Wii has remained connected with no problems, and I've recently used a USB dongle on another pc, also with no problems.


If anyone has any thoughts... ie. are the newer drivers bad? should I revert to the old ones? Is it likely the Dell Wlan card is just rubbish? Should I insist on an upgrade to something else?


cheers,

Ross
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First off, I would try other drivers. If that doesn't work, try going upstairs near the router and see if that helps. If that fails, then likely it's a bad card.
It could also be your router, do you have another one you could try? It's best to eliminate all possibilities before going to tech support, as they'll likely ask you the same questions.

 

Thanks for the quick reply

I don't have another router (or access to one) unfortunately.
I will try the older drivers again, but I noticed the same problem before (just not as often).

I forgot to mention that my friend who recently bought a Vostro 1700 with the default wifi card (presumably the same one) also reported the same issue - his wifi router is even closer to his laptop than mine is. Unfortunately it's a BT HomeHub which is basically the same router as mine, so I can't draw lots of conclusions from that. However, the Speedtouch 585 is widely recognised as a decent router (I researched before buying on the broadband forums) so the Dell card *should* work fine with it.

edit: I should say that my friend has reported low speeds, but not as drastically bad as mine.
It's also occurred to me I can pop in at a McDonalds on the way home and try their free wifi to see what happens there.

 

I've always had issues with wireless G, on multiple routers and multiple laptops (but all running intel wifi cards). The connection speed starts of at 54mbps, then randomly fluctuates between 1mbps,11 mbps, 24mbps, 36mbps and 54mbps. Pings to the router itself fluctate too.

For my home network now I run B mode only, I get stable pings and a constant connection speed of 11mbps. B mode is more than faster enough for my net connection, but local file copies suffer.

I've always blamed it on the wireless G protocol being more prone to intereference - whether thats actually the case or not I dont know.

 

Oh dear, in many ways that's the worst news - a replacement or new (relatively cheap) wifi card won't fix the problem I guess the alternative is to change my router for an 'n' spec one? I'll have to investigate how good they are...

 

Can you tell me how to force 'b' mode? I can't find anything in the Dell or Broadcom UI's to set anything other than the security options.