Help needed with wireless connection!

kam1nsk1

Hello

Wonder if anyone can help, bit stuck with a laptop.

Story is, my mates fairly new Acer Aspire 3690 was in a pretty unusable state, really slow and cpu use always through the roof even with nothing running, and running vista with pretty low ram (512mb). As he is not very technically minded I offered to format it for him and install xp instead to see if it ran any better.

I have done this, it seemed to work pretty well but unfortunately it still isn't running very well on the internet. It connects to our wireless internet okay (I think it's using windows to do this) but it seems really slow compared to our dell laptop (which is a similar spec), it downloads pages quite slowly and refuses to conect to many sites at all (I think its timing out). I downloaded the network adapter driver but it did ask a rather strange thing when it was installing -

"T .hmmessage P !! margin:0px; padding:0px } body.hmmessage !! font-size: 10pt; font-family:Verdana } the installation program installs the driver automatically when the client adapter i inserted. Insert the adapter now if it is not yet inserted, cancel the new found hardware wizard if it appears, and proceed with the installation. click ok to continue".

Dunno if this is relevant but thought I'd include it anyway, as you may have worked out I'm not exactly part of the I.T. crowd either so any help massively appreciated

Cheers
Minski

geewhiz

You could try downloading the most up to date drivers for the network card and xp then uninstall the card and reinstall using the downloaded drivers.

There's a good chance it's running an incompatible driver at the moment.

kam1nsk1

I have tried this but either I'm doing it wrong or it isn't working.

I have downloaded the latest driver for the network adapter (atheros 5007eg), the download speed seems better (it wasn't that bad to start with really) but it still won't connect to certain websites (it seems like any website where you may have downloads, such as mozilla, the acer website, etc). Is there anything else that could be causing this?

kam1nsk1

Just by way of an update - the download speed is still quite poor on most websites, any one any ideas?

exup

have you updated XP itself ?

sievm

Have your tried connecting the laptop to the router as a wired computer? (apologies if you are not using a router but it sounds like you are) At least would test whether it is the wireless part of the loop which is the problem.