Horrible throughput, 802.11g

[bob]

I set up another PC in here, I cant remember exactly what its card is. But it was some kind of 54-G belkin PCI card. The AP is belkins cheapest AP/Router, 7240-5 or something.

My PC has a $9.99 Ralink RT2500 card (which is nothing short of a miracle for that price). Im able to pull about 12-14Mbs off the belink AP with my rig. My brothers rig, similar specs but a belink PCI wifi card. Signal strength on his rig is about -40Dbm, mines closer to -20/-30 (varies). About 2 meters away from the AP, nothing else near us that can be interfering.

I first noticed the problem, when windows XP's network-neighborhood (or whatever its called now) would freeze up explorer.exe every time It tried to look at his PC. He tried downloading a 30MB .zip off the internet, barely pulling 5KBps. I was sucking nearly 90KBps from the same website.

I tried to send him a 400MB file through one of his shared folders, his download speed dropped to 2KBps and the file transfer said it had something like one day left . His ping was very good (0-2ms), just horribly slow. Fresh install of XP. Out of desperation I even factory-reset the AP/router, unplugged the router, ap, and switch and left them off for a minute and re-plugged everything back in.

For now his PC is wired into the switch with Cat5. Id like to know where to start in finding exactly what the heck is going on, since Im stumped on this one. Over cat5, his PC can pull nearly 80Mbps, over Wifi it peaks out at 5-6KBps.

 

[[wizard]]

all three devices are wireless G?

belkins are not known for good AP's. dlink is not alot better.

some wireless cards useup alot of system resources. check the system, with and without the wireless card enabled and see if the processor usage and/or memory usage changes dramatically.

 

[amenthes]

I would agree that more often than not, its a system performance issue compounded with cheap wireless hardware.

Remember the old days when there were "real" modems and "soft" modems? Soft modems would use some of the CPU to do their processing instead of doing it all on the modem itself, thus making the caard much cheaper.

The same holds true for wireless equipment. IMHO, a $10 wireless card is just simply not comparable to a $40 or $50 one. There is a reason its that cheap, the big name brands don't just mark up their products for the fun of it (well, there is price premium for name brands, but its usually justified, and it still doesn't account for a $30 difference in cost).

 

[bob]

Cpu load was jumping around from 2-5% on this pc while copying the file. Ill try ad-hoc between the two PC's tonight and see if I can rule out the AP.