One network card slower than the other????

Hi -

I have a Ibm intellistation desktop - it 5 years old PIII, 1ghz, 1 gig ram, etc. I got a dell e1505 in April and set up a wireless network with a linksys router 54g base model. All is great except my desktop has significantly lower downloads than my laptop as measured at speakeasy.net. these speed checks are being done back to back and im getting pretty consistant results. I have tested the laptop both wired and wireless. Ill just give download speeds as i get 220-235 kbps upload very consistant (i think we are capped at 256 - which sux). here are the results over several tries:

Desktop wired ~ 4194, 4688, 3995, 3947 kbps
laptop wired ~ 6567, 6502, 6156 kbps
laptop wireless ~ 5975, 4893, 6236, 5407 kbps

so wired im roughly 2000kbps slower on the desktop, and wireless some 1.5mbps slower.

I even swapped cables to see if that was the difference.

My nic in the intellistation is a intel proset ibm 10/100etherjet pci adapter with alert on lan. I havent found any better drivers yet. there are all sorts of diagnostics and advanced properties in the control panel, but im not sure about how to set them.

Any help in optimising this thing for better downloads?

 

turns out i think it might have been my software firewall. i uninstalled it and speeds went un to 6000kbps. I had systemsuite 4.0 from ontrack - now by vcom i think. it was several years old. i replaced it with zone alarm free edition. the other toosl i used from this suite i replaced with freebees - avg antivirus, ccleaner, and diskkeeper lite. i know this freeware isnt the best, but its good enough for me.