Laptop With Slow Connection

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.

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 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.)

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

I'm pretty much convinced its a hardware issue on her end since my
laptop (a new HP running Vista) is further away from the base station
and is blazing on the net.

Any insight as to what is going on would be appreciated


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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