why wifi twice as fast on win7 to xp?

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Hi all,

I am in a quandry, I have a netbook that has Win7, 54 Mbps wifi and a download speed on a broadband checker of around 6.4Mbps whereas righ next to it I have an XP laptop with 54Mbps wifi and the download speed is exactly half.

Using SIW I have yet to find the reason why

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Eliminate the WiFi element by connecting both laptops to the router using ethernet patch cables, and disable the router WiFi temporarily. Run the ThinkBroadband Speed Test (you’ll need to install the Java runtime if you haven’t already got it).

Note that the actual WiFi data transfer speed will be only about 20-40% of the nominal 54 Mbps (if that), but it should be consistently higher than the download speed you are measuring in the speed test, so the WiFi element could probably be ignored…

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Thank you I will report back later

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OK as probably suspected, When using the LAN cable only, both computers recorded the same levels of around 6.4 Mbps. Again when using the wifi, the laptop was half the speed of this whereas the netbook matched it.

To expand on the setup now as that may help.

My Netbook is running Win7 on a Dell Mini, the installation was uneventful and to connect up I just go through the win7 interface.
The Laptop is a Dell Inspiron 510m, I reinstalled the XP OS from the recovery disc. Installing the driver for the wireless did not seem a problem though this uses Dells own WLAN interface. I initially had no known problem though I think the the half speed connection was present. I have had one incidence of conflict between the XP wireless manager and the Dell manager, I found that the only way to have a stable connection, even thogh XP was not managing the network (the Dell manager was) the only way for stability was to ensure the correct password for the network was in both managers.

I tried to see if I could install just the driver and not the network manager but in device manager, the WLAN device is not present unless I install the WLAN manager with the driver.

It looks like both managers are sharing the connection but the browser is only receiving half the connection.

Does this sound relevant.

BTW I see you are in the SW of England, I am near Stonehenge myself 🙂

Thank you for any help.

Adrian

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When I think about it, I have had this before when loading drivers for wifi on a friends desktop. It was a Tenda USB wifi and again it was wifi conflit that gave reception but not stable connection. What am I doing wrong when installing wifi drivers. Do I need to uninstall XP wireless network manager if another network manager is installed with a driver?

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Do I need to uninstall XP wireless network manager if another network manager is installed with a driver?

The Dell connection manager is simply another layer on top of the hardware. You have only one physical WiFi interface and can receive data through that port using one connection manager at a time – the two can’t share the bandwidth simultaneously.

3rd-party managers are sometime fickle beasts and it’s possible the Dell manager has a problem. Unless there is a strong reason not to do so, I would revert to the inbuilt Windows Zero Configuration. Run services.msc and make sure the Windows Zero Configuration service is running and set to automatic, then disable the Dell connection manager (I’m guessing at this point that there is an option in the Dell manager to disable or use WZC rather than a full blown uninstall).

You should be able to connect using the standard XP Wireless connection wizard from there and, assuming the wireless card in the laptop is an 802.11g (rather than 802.11b), you should get a decent connection.

….actually, there’s another thought – check the WiFi interface in Device Manager and make sure it’s set to either 802.11g or 802.11b/g rather than 802.11b. The latter being a slower interface.

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OOps submitted early

..exactly half that of the netbook. It would be unlucky if the protocol difference gave in effect an exact half.

I just cannot fathom it.

I am going to look into changing node type tp see if it makes a difference.

Thanks again for looking at this

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Sorry, I’m, a little bit confused by your last updates. Perhaps it’s something I missed in your earlier posts, but are you connecting the XP laptop to the wireless router via the Win7 machine or are they connecting independently of each other to the router?

Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) from the Win7 box to the XP box may well give the bandwidth reduction you observe.

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Thank you for looking at this, Ihave managed to stop the Dell manager through msconfig disabling WLTRAY in startup and Dell wireless manager in services but with no visible difference. I went through the all advanced options on the network adapter with no change to browser speed reception. However, I did note that modes for BSS and IBSS were set to 802.11b and not configurable to 802.11g. I then remember on SIW it reported that the netbook wireless had a node type of peer to peer whereas the laptop reported “0” (ipconfig/all showed this as “unknown”). So I wonder, does the laptop think lets use the basic setup and run in case it is an adhoc or bridge connection and run ad the lowere speed?

But having typed this it can’t be right,

The speeds registered in the browser are the connection speeds to the internet, the issue we are concerned with is the connection from the netbook to the laptop, the difference in speed between 802.11b and 802.11g is 11 and 54Mbps. The drop I am experiencing is exactly

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Sorry for any confusion, both machines access the router wirelessly and independently, there is no connecting through another machine

Oh and I have now changed it to peer to peer on the node type with no change in apparent download speeds.

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This still continues to vex me so I will try the Dell community to see if they have had any similar instances of this,

Thank you for considering this.

A

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OK so no one has replied on the Dell site 🙁

This is so odd, similar rated hardware yet there obviously something halving the connection to the router.

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It’s difficult to see what could cause this. However, some of the tweaks and changes (per-to-peer, ad-hoc etc.) that you have tried along the road may now be obscuring the root cause of problem.

I would attempt to start from a clean slate – no, not a full windows clean install, but completely remove the network interface and re-install it. From what you describe, you have a Dell manager on the XP box too. In order to assist debug, I would uninstall that via the uninstall programs in the Control Panel. After the Dell manager layer has gone, I would uninstall the driver for the WiFi card in device manager and disable the device. Then re-boot the machine and go back to device manager to re-enable the device (it may be necessary to scan for hardware changes or XP may detect the “new” interface immediately). If necessary allow XP to download a driver automatically over the ethernet port. If there is no Microsoft driver for the port, try find the driver on the Dell site, but make sure it’s just the driver not a WiFi suite or manager. No need to adjust the device port settings, just let Windows manage it.

If that all goes according to plan, you should have a clean WiFi install without the Dell layer on top of the Windows Zero Configuration. So, now using the the Windows WiFi Connection wizard connect to the router (disconnect ethernet!) and see what the speeds are. Don’t use “Setup a new network connection” in the network connections window – I’m expecting you will get a “Wireless connections are available” pop-up message from the notification area and can connect through that simply by adding the WEP or WPA key rather than building a new network connection from scratch.

Make sure the Win7 machine is not using WiFi at the time. Even better, turn the Win7 box off, so there can be no contention at all.

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Thank you Tinto Tech,

I will try this out and see if I can install it new.

I will report back whatever results I get.

Cheers.

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