Intel 3945ABG continually disconnects or is slow - help

sorry if this question is answered by a search but at this point even doing that is a task.

I got my dell xps 1710 in late august and it has been fine connecting wirelessly to my router in my apartment but as time has gone on it has gotten worse. About say 2 weeks ago it would start disconnecting me and then reconnecting but it was only say once every couple hours so I thought nothing of it. But last night and today I am getting disconnected and reconnected every minute literally. It has to be my wireless card/computer because my other two roommates connect fine just as I used to.

I thought at first maybe it was an issue with an old driver for my card and/or old firmware on the router. I updated the driver and I thought that fixed it last night, but now I see that it was just luck because I'm being disconnected and reconnected as we speak and I'm not even at the apartment. I'm my campus' wireless right now and its behaving just the same if not worse.

Another thing I noticed last night is when it was working, I was downloading a file (the new drivers) at about 40 kb/s but when I connected directly thru my NIC instead of wireless I was downloading at 500 kb/s. And when the card wasn't working properly and I was being disconnected continuously, I was downloading at about 8 kb/s.

I've tried some settings suggested in intel pro/wireless like disabling QoS mode, setting power management to highest performance etc.

So if anyone has any input or suggestions, please don't hesitate to respond. I am in need of help greatly.

Thanks

 

Have you tried deleting your connection, reboot and Add the connection back.

Are you using MS Zero Config? prefered over intel's.

 

I've used both intel and zero, using zero right now. Neither is better than the other.

Is there anything I can do to diagnose the problem?

Right now its worse than ever, I just had 20 minutes straight of connect/disconnect. I wasn't connected long enough to even get to this page and click reply.

Also, it does not let me delete the connection under network connections (doesn't matter if it is disabled first or not). I've installed drivers and rebooted many times as well.

I doubt this helps but here's what I got when it disconnects and tells me theres limited or no connectivity (this is on campus btw):

Physical Address: 00-13-02-CC-B7-D2
IP Address: 10.30.138.47
Subnet Mask: 255.255.240.0
Default Gateway: 10.30.128.1
DHCP Server: 10.30.128.1
Lease Obtained: 9/25/2006 2:30:00 PM
Lease Expires: 9/25/2006 10:30:00 PM
DNS Servers: 128.227.128.226, 128.227.128.24
WINS Server:

I would think the fact that it was downloading last night from a site wirelessly only at 20-40kb/s while a direct RJ-45 hook up to the router got me 500 kb/s would help others who know more about this than I do diag. the problem.

 

Right now its working w/o any major problems at home. I get maybe 150 kb/s max on my downloads though when my roommate gets the same exact downloads at 300.

On campus though it was horrible. Maybe due to some settings I changed to get it to work at home? I was disconnected and reconnected every minute literally.

I called up Dell and they're sending me out a new card. Should be here around thursday. Hopefully that helps out. Cause I even hooked up a usb wireless card that my roommate had lying around and that connected just fine and downloads just as fast if not faster than the internal card I have.

 

I am having the exact same problem, only on a NX7400.. Any tips?

 

I also got some problem when my notebook runs on battery.

To solve this, try to change some properties of the network adapter.
Network Connections->Select your wifi adapter->Properties->Configure...

There I have a property called 'Power Management' in the given list.
try to set this property to 'Highest'.

Christophe