Why is my wireless adapter slow with only one particular access point and not others?
May 18, 2010 3:09 AM   Subscribe

Why is my wireless adapter only slow with one particular access point?? I have an Acer Aspire One netbook connected to my home wireless router. For some reason, they don't like each other. Internet access is extremely slow only when i'm connected to that particular router.

What makes this confusing is that: 1. Other laptops in the house connect to the router without any speed problems and 2. My netbook connects to other wireless routers all over the place without any speed problems. Also, it seems to be web browsing that is super slow. When i'm connected to my home router and downloading things off of bittorrent, the download speeds are on par with what I would expect. What could be the possible causes of this problem? I am a pretty technical person and really have no idea where to start diagnosing this. All my drivers are up to date, i tired changing the channels on the router, firewalls are disabled, no security software is running, no port forwarding nada.
posted by postergeist to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Sometimes particular combinations of wireless devices trigger bugs (I would usually blame the router, as most clients just run a fairly vanilla operating system driver) . Does your netbook claim to have a decent signal strength / speed? If it mostly works I would suspect some sort of problem with DNS or something that is making it feel slow - try this test and see what it says: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/.

If that doesn't help, here's what I would do for wireless problems:
1) Update firmware on router
2) Check latest drivers on client
3) Try using an ethernet cable if possible
4) Try forcing the router to a different wireless standard (if it's 802.11n set it to 802.11g only, if it's already g try setting it to b only).

Good luck!
posted by samj at 4:17 AM on May 18, 2010


Compare the speed of wget to various browsers.
posted by orthogonality at 5:01 AM on May 18, 2010


Two things that have been problems for me:
* Weird wifi-radio interference causing slowdowns, see this earlier post for reference.
* Bittorrent uploading by other computers. Anybody on the network uploading over ~40k/s causes crazy packet loss and slow web browsing (but this doesn't necessarily show up as slower bittorrent download rates for whatever reason)
posted by beerbajay at 6:23 AM on May 18, 2010


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