slow wireless

I have 2 laptops that are very slow and a Mac that is fast. The 2 slow laptops both have Atheros ar 9285 adapter cards, I connect to a Linksys wrt160n router. I have tried adjusting the router setting and updating the drivers for the Atheros but no matter what I try I can't get a download speed of faster than 700kbps while the Mac gets speeds of 20+mbps. I have takes my 2 laptops to work and logged on and got speeds of 20+mbps just not at home with the wrt160n or a new Linksys e4200 (returned since it was just as slow as the wrt160n). Any ideas on what I should do.

I currently have wpa2 only nband but still slow.

 

Yeah- AR9285 is crap and those cards are to blame.
Both have issues with "n" mode- see what happens if you switch your router to "g" mode.

And a proper solution is to replace those cards.

 

wow....I g mode I got 14000 kbps. I never tried that.
Ok what card do I buy to replace these with?
I still want to have blutooth.

 

If these are old laptops it might not be worth it at all- if you find 14mbos acceptable you may leave it at that until both laptops die.

Otherwise you need something cheap and good- Intel 5300 would do.
Intel 5300 doesn't have Bluetooth on board but AR9285 doesn't have it either (at least not by default).
Are you sure that you don't have a separate BT device?

 

they are both new, November/December 2012. you are correct about the bluetooth, one laptop has bluetooth and the other doesn't. Can I add bluetooth now while I'm adding a new card?

 

You could buy a card like Intel 6230 that has BT on-board for one laptop and something like 6200 for the other one that already has BT.