Couple of questions

Hi there,

I want to know, how can I improve the performance of the Wi-Fi card in my thinkpad, I mean, I have a _Compaq with the Broadcom b/g wireless card, and it has a download rate of 100 kbps (my ISP claims that I have 1MB of broadband) but with my thinkpad it only downs at 40 kbps rate.

Oh, and my second question, is, what is the material used in the top cover of the thinkpad T61?

Thanks in advance for reading me.

 

You can go into Power Manager and make sure the wireless adapters are at maximum performance as well as turning off any power management in the driver settings (if it's there).

I believe the lid material is rubberized plastic.

 

Thanks Arki, I checked the settings in the _Compaq laptop and it's set as power saving in the Power Manager Options, so I guess that is not the issue. I think there is maybe another reason for the low performance of the Intel wireless card. I wonder what is the maximum down speed that this card supports?

Thanks

 

Plug in to your router over Ethernet to verify your speed.

Go to www.speedtest.net to check your speed on hardwire (this will be what your ISP actually provides).

Then switch over to wireless right next to the router and run the test again (this should be +- 10% of the first test).

Then move to the farthest area in your house that you would want to use Wi-Fi and run the test again.

If possible, you should also try transferring files between computers on your home network (e.g. with Windows file and folder sharing). Ideally, one of the computers should be hardwired and the other should be on wireless. This will tell you what the card actually supports for throughput.

I highly doubt that your home network is slowing down your internet speeds (probably congestion and/or traffic shaping by your ISP). 802.11b will be plenty for most flavors of DSL and cable modems. 802.11g will be fine for anything but the fastest FiOS connections.

 

Thanks Jon,

I ran the test in both laptops, the _Compaq and the _Thinkpad, and the results were kind of intresting, in the _Compaq with the Broadcom Wireless Card the down speed is ~850 ~900 kbps, and the up speeds are between the 300 and 330 kbps, while with the _Lenovo with the Intel Wireless Card the down speeds are average of ~500 ~550 kbps, and the up speeds are somewhere near ~250. It make me guess that it might be a configuration problem with the Intel wireless card, since with the broadcom I'm downloading files at ~95 ~105 kbps (according to IE and Mozilla download window) and with the _Lenovo the download speeds are at maximum 45 kbps.

Thanks for your replies so far, and for some odd reason, I can't give you guys rep points?

 

What happens when you plug into lan card?

 

The same thing, but now with the updates, seem to be working good, I dl a document and the download window in IE showed me down speeds of 90kbps.