Dell 1350 wireless cards with Linksys WRT54G router

[jferrante]

This is just an FYI:

This might have been lack of patience on our part, but we recently rolled out 6 Dell Inspiron 8600 notebooks with Dell (Broadcom) 1350 wireless G mini PCI cards factory installed. (I also own an 8600)

The latest Dell drivers were installed, the Linksys firmware upgraded to 3.01.3.

All were able to connect to the network and surf the web. BUT... the network connections were painfully slow. I'm talking about 1 minute to transfer a 200k Word document or 15 minutes to transfer a 1 MB picture file.

Like I said earilier, I own one and like it a lot, but it has an Intel 2200 card in it instead of the Dell. My works fast and fine on the customer's network.

Dell was no help. Linksys was no help. Our solution was to replace the Dell wireless cards with Intels. All is fine now.

There might be an easy fix for this somewhere, but if you order a Dell notebook, spend the extra $10 and get an Intel wireless card and save the aggravation.

I'm not looking for a solution to this as all of the Dell cards are in the trash at my customer's request.

Jeff

 

[bcastner]

As your are not looking for a "solution", this comment begs for some additional details.

From the Linksys firmware revision, I can only guess that your are using a Linksys WRT54G or WRT54GS, and I do not know the hardware level for either. In any case, your firmware version 3.01.3 is several months out of date.

As for the Dell laptops, I agree the Intel is a better inboard adpater (for reasons likely different than yours), but I cannot duplicate your experience with nearly a 1,000 Inspiron installs in the last month. These were all new machines, with XP Professional at the Service Pack 2 level pre-installed.

 

[bcastner]

I note too, that Dell has revised the adapter drivers on 11/17/2004:

http://support.dell.com/support/dow...tegory=5&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=6482&devlib=5

 

[jferrante]

Bill,

I have learned more from reading your posts on Tek-tips in the past year than I have from all other sources combined over the past 10 years.

I value your comments and tips always and have applied many in my day to day operations and my personal life as well.

I would love to read what your background is exactly, and what your day consists of. I know you spend hours helping others on this forum and several others.

I have been in this industry for 17 years, but still feel humbled every day by how little I know. I study everything I can get my hands on, practice what I learn on a table full of "test" computers, but since I work primarily by myself, I find the challenge of making a living and keeping up with new technology overwhelming.

I'm not sure what went wrong with the installation I mentioned above. It's really bothering me that I couldn't figure it out. I was simply pointing out that the Intel wireless cards practically install themselves and in my opinion they are a much better purchase than Dell's

Your comments and suggestions are always appreciated. Please keep it up.

Jeff Ferrante

P.S. I sometimes long for the good old DOS days!