wireless reception sucks

[goodtimes5]

I have a netgear wireless router connected to a imac #1. I have an Airport Express card installed in imac #2. (By the way, when you stick in the airport card, how hard are you supposed to push? I had to cautiously push hard until I heard a tiny click. Is that it?) So my imac#1 is hard-wired to the router, and it gets 170kb/s. My imac#2, roughly forty feet away from the router, only gets 30kb/s.

Do you intelligent people think it's the router or the airport card? I just can't deal with the fact that my eleven year old sister is getting almost 6x the speed I'm getting and I'm the computer guy.

 

[JeDiBoYTJ]

interesting, im approx 20-25 feet from my router, and it goes through approx 3-4 walls, and I get 2 lines of reception in my airport indicator, yet I can still download at my full DSL speed (160kb/s or so).

hmm... 170 and 30 is pretty drastic, you could possibly have a lot of interference. go into the router settings and try changing the broadcast channel (default is 6 in the US). look at your documentation for information on how to do it.

 

[goodtimes5]

lol default is 6 in the US? My router's default was set at 11. Gonna go fix it now.

 

[Phat_Pat]

is the router b or g

 

[goodtimes5]

changing the channel made no difference

it is a g router

 

[kilpajr]

This makes no sense

If it is a 802.11g router and card, the nominal speed is 54 Mbps. This is approximately 5.4 MBps. Even if you were getting 1% of this (which I don't think is possible since there shouldn't be a connection if it was going to be this slow) you would be getting 54 KBps.

What kind of internet connection do you have? If it was a 384 Kbps connection this might make sense.

 

[goodtimes5]

its just the standard sbc yahoo dsl.

 

[Westside guy]

802.11g's practical range is much shorter than that of 802.11b. I find our laptops fall off the network at about 50 feet now, compared to 100+ feet with my old 802.11b router.

Do you have other wireless devices - telephone etc.? There can be interference problems if multiple devices are all trying to use the 2.4GHz band at the same time.

BTW when I put an Airport card in my daughter's iBook, it took me three tries to get it well connected. The Airport card doesn't need to be pushed into the socket very hard (you'll hear it click, as you reported); but the antenna connector had to be pushed into the card hard enough that I was worried about breaking it! Basically the square part of the antenna's connector should be just about flush against the end of the card. I had to push quite a bit to get it to that point (probably a good idea to have the card unattached to the machine while doing this).