Recently our cable provider boosted the internet speed to 15Mb/s down and 2Mb/s up. My son is connected to a desktop through the Cisco router and gets the stated speed. My wife has a newer Dell laptop and she also gets the stated speed.
My laptop is much older. I have a Dell Inspiron 9400 running WinXP and it has a WLAN 1390 card that doesn't have 5GHz capabilities.
The fastest speed I have been able to get out of the wirless card is 7Mb/s down and 2Mb/s up.
Is this the limitation of my 1390 mini card or is something else going on here.
Re: Everybody In The House Has Fast Wireless But My Laptop
It could be . . have you installed the newest driver from the manufacturers support site?
Lets take a peek at your network environment:
Please Download and run this Xirrus WiFi Inspector, click the Networks link on the upper left and paste a screen shot of that screen here. Note that this application requires NET Framework to run. If you get an error about a missing function, download and install NET Framework.
To post a screen shot of the active window, hold the Alt key and press the PrtScn key. Open the Windows PAINT application and Paste the screen shot. You can then use PAINT to trim to suit, and save it as a JPG format file. To upload it to the forum, open the full reply window and use the Manage Attachments button to upload it here. For Vista and Windows 7, 8 you can use the Windows Snipping Tool
That can take a few minutes to complete, come back and past the result in a message here.
If you are on a machine with no network connection, use a floppy, USB disk, or a CD-RW disk to transfer a text file with the information to allow pasting it here.
Re: Everybody In The House Has Fast Wireless But My Laptop
The latest driver that I could find was 2007. Still pretty outdated. It had a 2006 driver in it. I thought I found a 2014 driver but it turned out to be the 2007 driver.
Now the question is, if I upgrade the mini card to a more modern version....will it help?
Re: Everybody In The House Has Fast Wireless But My Laptop
My previous internet speed was 5Mb/s down and about .8Mb/s upload.
I noticed that it was doing just under 2Mb/s up and checked my account to find that they upgraded their lowest speed customers to the new lowest speed which is now 15Mb/s.
I hooked it up the the router with an Ethernet cable and was able to confirm the 15Mb/s down. It actually did a bit better than 16.
I then switched off the local and back to the wifi card and it actually did 10Mb/s down. I had a -35db signal because I was only a few feet from the antenna. I went back to my chair and the signal was back to it's normal -45 to -50dB as was noted on the Xirrus program.
But it was still doing about 9Mb/s. Just checked it right now and saw 10Mb/s. Wonder if connecting it to the router directly kicked something back into place.
Re: Everybody In The House Has Fast Wireless But My Laptop
Yes, this is the card that will fit into my computer. They have several form factors that are the half height version. I guess the only problem might be finding a driver for it that supports XP
Re: Everybody In The House Has Fast Wireless But My Laptop
It might be a problem on the laptop itself? Old systems can only do so much. You also might want to check with your provider if it consistently bothers your work.
Re: Everybody In The House Has Fast Wireless But My Laptop
Just checked and it still said 2. You'll get yours. I ordered when they had 3. Took a day for the order to be processed. Maybe it won't get processed til Monday.
Hope it works, for both of us. Now I'll just have to find the correct driver. Not really bothering to look yet, although I'll need it before I install the card lest I hook up by Ethernet cable.
Re: Everybody In The House Has Fast Wireless But My Laptop
Looks like the same file I downloaded already for this card
Dell_multi-device_A17_R174291.exe
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