Is the wireless on your laptop too slow?

I have always thought that the wireless on my Dell was slower than it should be, but I never took the time to figure out why. I figured it was my router which has issues anyway and disconnects me a couple of times a day (it is on it’s way out the door!).

Today I’ve been copying some files over from my Dell to the Acer Aspire One, and I’m going “I KNOW this should be much faster!” I did a Google search and came up with something interesting.

From Peve’s Blog: It’s a setting for the power management of the wireless card. It is set to Power Save Mode. To change it, in Windows XP, right click on My Computer and go to Manage. Click on Device Manager. Expand the Network Adapters, right click on the Atheros adapter, and choose Properties. Click on the Advanced tab. In the left column click on Power Save Mode and set the value to Off. Click ok to exit Device Manager.

I am using Windows 7 on my Acer  (post coming on that tomorrow) , so the clicking was a bit different . In Windows 7 click on the Windows button, right click on Computer, go to Manage. Click Device Manager, expand the Network adapters, right click on the Atheros adapter, go to Properties. Click on the Power Management tab, and uncheck the “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power”.

And lastly, on my Dell which is running Vista,  when you go to the Properties of your adapter, click on the Advanced tab, then find Minimum Power Consumption on the left and set the value to disabled.

I hope this helps speed some folks up.