get better range out of these things?

Other than making sure you are running decent versions of the firmware and/or drivers, all you can do from a practical perspective is shift the devices around to improve reception.

If you are willing to mess with it, you can imporve range, etc using better antennas, boosters, or parabolic reflectors, but few folks seem to want to bother with such stuff.

Beyond that, bear in mind that this stuff has been evolving, and the newest generation hardware seems to be substantially better in both connection reliability and throughput, especially in less than optimal conditions.

I would suggest, when the time comes, looking at the newest generations of integrated 802.11a/b/g products, which covers all the wireless frequency bands, and should be able to keep up with the evolving wireless standards for the next few years.