Hey guys. My Dad is having a problem, and so far I haven't been able to debug it successfully. Hoping you all might have some ideas.
He has a Linksys router hooked up to a Comcast cable modem. He and my Mom each have laptops. He works in his office 30 feet away from the router and one floor up, one intervening interior wall. She works in the same room as the router. His machine is an HP with an internal Belkin pre-N adapter running Vista. I don't know what adapter she has but its a lot older, probably a B adapter, and she's running XP.
About 3 weeks ago he started noticing significant performance problems when working in his office. Pages would take a long time to load. He tested the throughput using Speakeasy as was getting speeds as low as 1-1.5 Mbps. My mother in the room below was getting 7+ Mbps. If he took his laptop down to the router and cabled in he got 20 Mpbs, which Comcast stated was the rated speed.
If he takes his machine downstairs he gets better than 15. Take it back upstairs and it drops down again. If he carries my Mom's machine upstairs there is no meaningful degradation. When sitting in his office and experiencing the performance issues his signal strength is indicated at four bars.
While on the phone we ran through a few basic tests at a time when he was experiencing the issues. Pinged the router, all <3 ms and no dropped packets. Pinged the Comcast gateway, all <13 ms and no dropped packets. I had him uninstall the existing driver for the Belkin, download the latest and install that. The problem persisted.
So I'm at a bit of a loss. Anyone have any thoughts? The machine is probably four years old, and the router 3-4 years. I hesitate to finger the adapter, but I have thought of suggesting that he pick up an external USB adapter anyway just to see whether it behaves differently.
He has a Linksys router hooked up to a Comcast cable modem. He and my Mom each have laptops. He works in his office 30 feet away from the router and one floor up, one intervening interior wall. She works in the same room as the router. His machine is an HP with an internal Belkin pre-N adapter running Vista. I don't know what adapter she has but its a lot older, probably a B adapter, and she's running XP.
About 3 weeks ago he started noticing significant performance problems when working in his office. Pages would take a long time to load. He tested the throughput using Speakeasy as was getting speeds as low as 1-1.5 Mbps. My mother in the room below was getting 7+ Mbps. If he took his laptop down to the router and cabled in he got 20 Mpbs, which Comcast stated was the rated speed.
If he takes his machine downstairs he gets better than 15. Take it back upstairs and it drops down again. If he carries my Mom's machine upstairs there is no meaningful degradation. When sitting in his office and experiencing the performance issues his signal strength is indicated at four bars.
While on the phone we ran through a few basic tests at a time when he was experiencing the issues. Pinged the router, all <3 ms and no dropped packets. Pinged the Comcast gateway, all <13 ms and no dropped packets. I had him uninstall the existing driver for the Belkin, download the latest and install that. The problem persisted.
So I'm at a bit of a loss. Anyone have any thoughts? The machine is probably four years old, and the router 3-4 years. I hesitate to finger the adapter, but I have thought of suggesting that he pick up an external USB adapter anyway just to see whether it behaves differently.
