Vista Wireless-N Slow to a Crawl Please Help....

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?

Reply to
Billy
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Billy-- Is this the Broadcom BC4322? Jim

Reply to
jpsga

Jim - without being in front of the machine (im at work) I want to say "yes" as I recall that driver directory as reference to the drivers installed. The date I think was 9/2007 or maybe even earlier as driver stamp. I will confirm all this tonight after 9pm EST from home an post follow-up. What I was trying to do was to update the driver with the BCM4321 which btw is a lesser number than you specify but is Dell recommended on their site under my system and has a release date of

4/11/08 (very recent).

Do you know of an issue with the BC4322 driver and/or hardware? That would help point me in the direction that I need to go....thanks!

Reply to
Billy

Jim - without being in front of the machine (im at work) I want to say "yes" as I recall that driver directory as reference to the drivers installed. The date I think was 9/2007 or maybe even earlier as driver stamp. I will confirm all this tonight after 9pm EST from home an post follow-up. What I was trying to do was to update the driver with the BCM4321 which btw is a lesser number than you specify but is Dell recommended on their site under my system and has a release date of

4/11/08 (very recent).

Do you know of an issue with the BC4322 driver and/or hardware? That would help point me in the direction that I need to go....thanks!

Billy-- I *Do not* know of any issue with the BC 4322. I wanted to look at the manual to see if you can drop back to G speeds. As it occures to me that the router must be capable of N speeds if it wants to talk to you new card at that speed. Jim

Reply to
jpsga

Yes, the WRT150N router is capable of wireless-N draft specification. It's a wireless N router. The other machines are using G on the client end to talk to the N router and far outperform the speed of my newer N- card within the offending machine. The issue is that not only do the G's outperform the N card, they topple it by as much as 80% faster. This is why I know there is something wrong.

Your idea about bumping the N down to G is a good test though to see if this changes things - If I can only find the darn documentation on any of this equipment I'd likely be farther ahead. Let me know what you find......

Reply to
Billy

Yes, the WRT150N router is capable of wireless-N draft specification. It's a wireless N router. The other machines are using G on the client end to talk to the N router and far outperform the speed of my newer N- card within the offending machine. The issue is that not only do the G's outperform the N card, they topple it by as much as 80% faster. This is why I know there is something wrong.

Your idea about bumping the N down to G is a good test though to see if this changes things - If I can only find the darn documentation on any of this equipment I'd likely be farther ahead. Let me know what you find......

I didn't find much because I still don't know the model number of the WIFI card. We were speculating that it is the DCM4322. By the way, did you disable the NIC in the Dell?

Jim

Reply to
jpsga

..

It's the Broadcom Wireless (US) WLAN Card, v.4.170.25.14, A00 BCM4321 WLAN driver that is installed.

Reply to
Billy

user error and a salesdroids lies......

From Dell

Dell-branded and internally installed Wi-Fi: (802.11 a/b/g/n Draft 2.0) standard

notice it is *DRAFT*

From linksys

The Access Point built into the Router uses the very latest wireless networking technology: Wireless-N (draft 802.11n)

Notice it is also *DRAFT*

however, drafts do not always talk to each other at full speed, specially when they are from different manufacturers....

no way in H that wireless will ever ever ever be faster than wired, if you buy into the numbers the sales people/liars stick in their literature, claiming an impossible number, that you beleive cause you see some silly lying number on a driver/on the screen, and think it must really be that fast cuz it says so, I got a bridge I'll sell you cheap.... Trust me, it's in writing!

at any rate, set everything to b/g only, it won't waste a lot of time trying to negotiate a non existant/incompatible n....

Reply to
Peter Pan

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