Zyxel Prestige 334W plus misc questions

[kk7]

I recently bought the router/fw/wlan-box Zyxel Prestige 334W. To my surprise, i found it to be extremely slow, I absolutely can't get more than 1,2MB/s from the ethernet WAN port when the router's firewall is turned on. With the firewall option disabled, the router can reach speeds up to about 3,8MB/s. Now this is quite the discomfort for me, with a nice 100mbit (does about 12MB/s without a router) uplink. I've called Zyxel support but they had very little to say about it, after some asking around, I hear that the router processor isn't good enough to handle those kinds of speeds (even though it's supposed to be 10/100mbit WAN), as usually, these boxes are bought for ADSL or similar connections with much less bandwith.

I am now wondering if someone has experience on this particular router, or some other prestige similar to this one. In the case that there's nothing I can do to it to make it go faster, does anyone have experience with routers from other manufacturers? I require a 54mbit+ WLAN ability with WEP/WPA and as fast a WAN port as possible, 50mbit at minimum. The router should also have a proper firewall and a switch with 4 LAN ports. PS. I dont want a 10000? Cisco router either .

My other question is related to networking as well as my OS. I have a Buffalo WLI-CB-G54S PCMCIA-card for my Compaq Evo n800w laptop, I run Debian on it with kernel 2.4. Any hints on whether or not its fully compatible with this are appreciated, Im pretty new to linux overall so haven't had a chance to try it out yet.

TIA

 

[kk7]

anyone? I'll have to take the router back to the store ASAP, any insight would be appreciated