Re: Laptop With Slow Connection

klugy wrote:
> Hello all, my first post here.
>
> Here is the situation.
>
> Bought an Apple Extreme Base Station, was using an Apple Express for my
> wireless. The Express worked brilliantly, just plugged it in and the
> computers saw it immediately and we had good speed and coverage.
>
> We are renting several rooms to students and the room furthest away
> from the base station was not getting a strong enough signal and kept
> dropping the internet. Hence the base station upgrade.
>
> Now one student is having problems. Super slow internet connection.
> Her signal strength is excellent and the speed is a consistent 56k. She
> had much better performance with the Airport Express even though the
> signal strength was lower.
>

Clearly it's a problem with her machine.

> This leaves me scratching my head. I helped her a bit by downloading
> and installing the latest drivers for her built in wireless adapter
> (intel 2200bg) and performance improved somewhat but I'm not sure
> whether it is a temporary thing. She has a Compaq Presario V4000 laptop
> running XP Home.

I have a 6710b and it works just fine from any location in my building,
and outside it too (it even picked up a link 1.6km away). Try moving the
machine physically closer (in the same room perhaps) as the AP.

>
> I have the base station set to channel 8 and we are running WPA2
> encryption.
>
> I turned off her Norton firewall and turned on Windows. (it seems that
> norton doesnt play well with the Apple.)

Shouldn't really cause a problem like this (usually there would be no
connection at all).

>
> She uses the HP wireless assistant which I didnt have a chance to
> update.

Might be an idea to update this. Mine didn't really need an update (it
was functioning fine anyway) when I first got the laptop, but I ran and
installed the updater anyway. HP's WLAN assistant can be interesting to
use, to say the least :)

--
- dcf