Dell Wireless 1395 WLAN Mini-Card Bottlenecking??

I just downgraded my m1730 XPS to XP today, and after downloading a couple torrents, decided to run some bandwith tests via speakeasy.

I have two laptops side by side, the m1330, and the 1730, and the m1330 gets download speeds from Seattle, WA, and San Francisco, CA at 11 Mbit, and 18+ Mbit respectively. The m1730 on the other hand, tops out at 6 Mbit for Seattle, and 10-11 Mbit for SF.

What the hell is going on here? It would seem like the Wireless Mini-Card is bottlenecking my potential bandwith. The 1330 has the Wireless Intel 4965AGN.

The driver that im using came straight from the website, and it says Driver Date 9/2007, and version: 4.170.25.12.

Thanks for any assistance.

**EDIT** I meant to say I enabled my 1730 for dual booting. I am logged into vista now, and re-tested the DL speeds. Surprisingly, they are good now. So in other words, something in windows XP is doing this. Does anyone know what it is? Thanks.

 

Was the 1730 doing anything else at the time, like background A/V scanning, reading/writing to disk, or does it have bluetooth?

 

No not a thing. I've narrowed the issue down to an XP problem, and not a Vista issue. However, it may still have something to do with the wireless card.

Is there some configuring I need to do in XP to fix this bandwith issue? Because its perfectly okay in Vista.

 

What encryption protocol are you using on the router?

 

I am using WEP, is that the problem?

 

Don't know until I poke around on google a bit and see if anything comes to light.

FYI, feel free to ignore the blathering below; it's not strictly germane to your question.

In terms of security, though, it is a problem. WEP is too weak and too easily jimmied to be of much use as real security - think of WEP as locking your screen door but leaving the deadbolt on your steel frontdoor unlocked - unless there's some reason why you have to stick with WEP (there are valid reasons, such as old network hardware you cannot afford to replace that only does WEP) you ought to consider moving up to a better encryption option.

 

Oh i know. I only have wep on there to stop average and accidental leeching. I know how to crack WEP and i know just how easy it is. But if someone wants to go through the trouble of cracking it, then so be it. I can monitor them on my client table anyway if I notice any irregularities. Besides, anyone who goes as far as to WEP crack tutorial-searching, could just as easily go waste his time WPA cracking as well.

 

Fair enough; at the end of the day, nothing will stop someone who's truly determined, and since 99.99% of all would-be wireless hackers are not determined, just bored and a little curious, all you need is just enough to make the idle curious go pester someone else's network, so long as you know what to look for in case that 0.01% wardrives your neighborhood.