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I was having some wireless issues so I updated the firmware of my wireless router. Important information....

LAN connection to router yields about 7Mbps internet speedtests (Speakeasy.net/speedtest) and that is my Internet speed so GOOD!
Wireless connection yields between 3-3.5Mbps
Wife's laptop wireless yields 6+ Mbps
My Wireless connection at my school yields 13Mbps

What is my problem? At home it says i'm connected to 802.11g (54Mbps), but I never get more than 3.5Mbps, even after the firmware update and default settings on the router.

what is the rating on your wifi card and router?

Is is 802.11a/b/g/n

You are certain that the notebook has the g card in it?

Card is a Dell 1505 (Broadcom 4328) 802.11a/b/g/n

Router is a DI-524 Wireless B/G

Wife's using a macbook, I'm on an XPS m1330

hummm

strange one then

It's wireless. Could be anything. First, test your laptop's local throughput to a computer with wired connection to your router. I think iperf might do the job. I've only used it for testing wired connections so I'm not sure if you can use it to test wireless. If you can get higher than 3-3.5Mbps on your laptop for local connections, then it's probably QoS settings on your router or something.

Also, do you get 3-3.5Mbps throughput even when you're close to the router? It's possible you're just getting low signal in the area where you tested your connection...

mine and my wife's computers were sitting next to each other, about 5 feet from router.

At my school, my wireless is capable of 13 Mbps, so I"m definitely capable of at least that throughput.
Edit: I haven't tried local throughput at home, I'm in class right now.

Where should I start troubleshooting?

You can download iperf from here.

Run iperf as server on the computer with wired connection. If you have a firewall, add iperf to the exception list. On your laptop, run as client and connect to the ip address of the computer with wired connection. That should give you your local throughput. If it's higher than 3.5Mbps, then that probably means you need to change QoS settings on your router to give your laptop higher priority for internet traffic.

Have you tried using your laptop's wireless with your wife's turned off? Any possibility your provider has you capped?

Her computer was off this morning when I first noticed the problem. (used to not be an issue, but I recently upgrade from 3Mbps to 7)

No way the ISP is limiting me I would think since she's getting full speed. I'm going to try the ipfer right now.

Until I can get my wife to give up her laptop so I can install iperf on it, I have my desktop (wireless connection on it too) running the server and I get anywhere from 4.43Mbps to 7.43 Mbps between the two.

The desktop is unfortunately 2 stories up and is as far away from the router as you can get in my house.

Another issue, The desktop (far away from the router and running windows) gets about the same speedtest results. Is this my router not playing well with windows?

jakegub wrote:Until I can get my wife to give up her laptop so I can install iperf on it, I have my desktop (wireless connection on it too) running the server and I get anywhere from 4.43Mbps to 7.43 Mbps between the two.

The desktop is unfortunately 2 stories up and is as far away from the router as you can get in my house.

Another issue, The desktop (far away from the router and running windows) gets about the same speedtest results. Is this my router not playing well with windows?

If your desktop is even farther than your laptop from the router, then that iperf result is useless. The reason I told you to use iperf is so you can determine maximum throughput of your wireless connection and it's hard to test that if both computers in the equation use wireless.

There is no way for me to get the desktop an ethernet connnection, and I couldn't figure out how to install the iperf on my wife's laptop. I tried all kinds of command line crap such as...
make
make install
make iperf
make install iperf
install iperf

If you have any suggestions for iperf on the mac, I can get that hooked up with an ethernet connection.

Thanks for the help!

I don't have a Mac but I found this:
http://iperf.darwinports.com/