Quote:
Just now I noticed that Windows claimed that the speed dropped to 1Mbps for a significant time while I was typing this up, but then went back when I reloaded a random web page. I assume it was just saving power as I'm on the laptop right now


I doubt that was a power saving situation. Odds are, your having a problem similar to my friend, and unfortunately it is one we haven't solved yet. He has gone through 3 base stations now, and just last wednesday experienced his network dropping back to crap again. Symptoms are the Windows tool reporting a speed from from 54mbts slowly down to 1.0. When this occurs, barley anything can be transmitted. Opening the Dell wireless utility reveals the problem, but we can't find the source. Generally the noise picked up skyrockets, thus making for a bad signal to noise ratio. Thus far, we can't find anything in his house causing it (no wireless phones, microwave was off), but we even saw it happen when testing with an ad-hoc network.

At this point we have run out of serious reasons of what might be wrong. He is now running a Linksys WRT54G, but I can't seem to talk him into the 3rd party firmware that allows boosting the power, to at least see if we could keep the power high enough to deal with the noise.