Incredibly slow internet on wireless desktop

[wjsprowler]

OK guys. I am hoping that I am posting in the right section. If not, let me know. Let me just explain my situation very briefly.

I just moved to a new apartment a couple of days ago, and there is basically a global wireless that comes with the apartment complex that we can all connect to and use.

I have an acer netbook as well as a homebuilt gaming desktop. The acer works just fine with the wireless internet (I get acceptable speeds, everything loads fine). However when I connect with my desktop, I get dial-up speeds with youtube videos stopping like 10 times during the video to load.

First I tried using a USB wireless adapter, and the internet was incredibly slow. At first I assumed that the USB stick was the problem so I recently installed a PCI wireless adapter (a pretty nice one) with 3 separate antennas to rule out bad reception. I am getting the exact same slow speed that I did with the USB stick.

I recently reformatted my hard drive about 2 months before I moved here, so a bogged down desktop shouldn't be the problem. Plus this computer is a beast.

Does anyone have any ideas about where I can go from here? I am using Windows 7 on both computers. The speed doesn't change with different browsers.

Many thanks,

Will

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Try moving your desktop around a bit; it may be trying to go through something metal on the floor below or something.

 

[wjsprowler]

Try moving your desktop around a bit; it may be trying to go through something metal on the floor below or something.

Thanks for the comment. I did try repositioning my computer throughout the room and it didn't do anything. The signal does say "very strong" when I look.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Might be a driver/software issue then.

What connection speed does it say? What about on the netbook?

 

[wjsprowler]

On speedtest.net, it says that the netbook got 15MB/s and my desktop got 2MB/s, which is interesting. However there is no way that I am even getting close to 2 MB/s on my desktop just from observing the load times of websites and youtube videos.

It is also weird because it seems like the desktop's internet will randomly stop working altogether and then go back to being incredibly slow again.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Megabytes per second or Megabits per second? Capitalization matters.

If you go to Network and Sharing Center and click on Wireless Network Connection, what does it say the speed is?

 

[wjsprowler]

The M is capital on speedtest.

Also it says 54.0 Mbps (capital M) when I look at wireless network connection in the sharing center.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

It's the B (bytes) or b (bits) that matters. Speedtest reports it in megabits per second.

At a guess, they're running quite an old router. Not sure why your netbook would be faster though.

 

[wjsprowler]

Ah, sorry about that. Both are in bits, not bytes (both have lowercase b).

And yeah, that's what I'm trying to figure out. It doesn't make any sense to me. It makes me wonder if there's some sort of setting on my desktop that needs to be changed. But I have no idea. When I was using an ethernet cable in my old apartment I had no issues at all with the internet. It seems to be just a wireless issue.

 

[wjsprowler]

Does anyone have any ideas?