OK, I think I can offer some suggestions. The Intel 2100 card you are only supports 802.11b, which while advertising 11Mbps throughput will normally deliver somewhere between less than 1 to 5Mbps max. in actual real-world throughput. How close you can get to 5Mbps can be affected by many things such as proximity, interference, congestion, access point firmware and settings, drivers, power management settings, and more.
To see if proximity is a problem, relocate the laptop to 6 feet or less from the router in a direct line of sight. Also change to using the much better
http://speedtest.net instead of the Qwest speedtest link you mentioned. Run a speedtest, what are the results? In the interest of minimizing other variables, keep this distance between the router and laptop for all of the remaining tests.
Drivers and driver based power management settings can affect speed. Install the
latest driver for that card and disable any wireless power management. To disable the power management in Windows you would open the device manager, select the device, then right click and select Properties; Advanced tab; then look for a "Power Save Mode" or any power related settings and either disable them or set them for minimum power savings (maximum power use). Once this is done, run another speedtest, what are the results?
The firmware in your router/access point is old, try updating to the
latest version to see if that helps. After updating, run another speeedtest, what are the results?
Since the 2100 card you are using only supports only 802.11b, set the Mode in the router to "b only". Run another speedtest, what are the results?
The wireless-b standard was released before WPA/WPA2 security was created, so many "b" cards don't even support WPA/WPA2, and those that do can have a performance penalty since the hardware wasn't originally designed for it. For testing purposes, disable the wireless security on the router and then run another speedtest, what are the results? Remember to turn the security back on after this test, as even if this turns out to hurt performance I would still choose security over performance any day.
That's about all you can do other than upgrading to a significantly faster 802.11g or 802.11n (recommended) card. For example, I'm using a
D-Link DIR-655 router/access point along with a an older
Atheros AR5008 chipset based Thinkpad 11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN (
Lenovo p/n 42T0825). I just ran some speedtests and here are my results:
Wired:
Wireless:
As you can see, 802.11n offers significantly higher wireless performance than wireless-b, but even wireless-g will support 20Mbps or more in real-world throughput. Scott.
