I recently bought a Dell XPS One with a Broadcom 802.11n Network card and wireless is slow and unusable.
My home network consists of a Motorola Surfboard cable modem via Comcast broadband service connected to a Linksys Wireless-N WRT150N router (configured w/ no WEP or Encryption - it's open) via CAT5E cable. The LAN has two WiFi-G enabled laptops and w/ Desktop all w/ WinXP Pro working efficiently and flawlessly for over a year. This Dell XPS One is a new machine introduced.
I connect the Dell XPS One w/ the Broadcom 802.11n Network card and Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 and the issue begins. BTW, the issues existed before applying the Vista SP1. For example, downloading a 3mb file takes over 3 to 5 minutes on this machine via WiFi. In contrast, on one of the other home LAN machines w/ XP and differant hardware, this takes less than 30 seconds. Also, I have skipping in YouTube videos and file copys from machine to machine in the LAN taking forever.
I checked the Wireless card properties on the offending machine and all settings look correct - im registering at 130 Mbps speed consistently according to the WiFi status. I looked at the wireless card driver and it appears to be the latest, however when I checked Dell's website it looks like their may be a newer one that arrived just this month. However, when I download and go to update the driver in device manager it says that I have the latest (the existing driver) and does not install the newer one.
One other test I did was to plug in a cat6 ethernet cable from the router to the back of the machine. It appears that my WRT150N router only has 100/Full from the LAN ports so I received a 100Mbps connection vi auto-negotiate setting. This is slower than the 10Mbps that the WiFi card status was reporting, btw. So, I did a download from the same site and bam, slower than XP machine, but way faster than the troubled WiFi connection - maybe 45 seconds to a minutes and it was done.
Do you think this is a bad WiFi card in the machine, driver issue, Windows Vista compatability, or any of the above?