I have posted about this issue in a couple different places, so far with no luck. Since I'm running Mint 12, I figured this should be the best place to post.
The problem and its history (skip ahead for a short summary):
I was excited for the release of Mint 12, as it seems like the perfect rendition of Gnome 3 on Ubuntu! So I grabbed it from the site, and installed it on the two machines I use primarily: My laptop and desktop. I was running Kubuntu 11.10 (recently upgraded from 11.04) prior to installing Mint 12, and my laptop's wireless speeds were very sluggish. Being that I had recently had some internet problems that were "fixed" by the cable tech, I figured it was probably just another ISP issue to call on. Before I called them, I figured I better investigate where the problem is coming from.
The first thing I did was a speed test on my laptop, with terrible results. Download speeds are at 1446 Kbps and upload at a horrendous 27 Kbps, at best. Next, I decided to test my desktop. The results for my desktop came in WAY better, downloading at 15021 Kbps and uploading at 1997 Kbps. I then ran a test on a Windows 7 desktop that's connected directly to the router and that had perfect results too.
The issue became isolated to my laptop. Come to think of it, I noticed that even the router setup pages were taking up to a minute or two to load, when they load almost instantly on my desktop. Also, since the problem got this bad, I can't even copy files to my file server, as the connection freezes. The speed tests are so bad on uploading that sometimes they fail to complete. The final test was to boot into Windows XP on my laptop and see if speeds were still horrible, as this would tell me if the issue is related to hardware or software. Sure enough, the connection is running great in XP and speed tests come back with great results. My infamous "router config page test" shows that all of the router config pages load almost instantly like on my desktop.
Short Summary of the above:
In short, I found my laptop's wireless connection to be extremely slow in Linux Mint, while all of my other computers seem to have nice fast connections. I've isolated the problem to be an issue with my wireless card, one way or another, in Linux Mint.
The big question:
How on Earth do I fix/optimize it? I tried playing around with iwconfig and setting the rate to 54Mbps and such, but nothing seems to speed it up.
I'm at a stand still here, as I don't know what to do next. I really DON'T want to use XP, as I really am enjoying Mint 12 and Gnome 3 a lot, and various other typical reasons that I like this OS better. Any help at all is much appreciated! I will post some info about my hardware, and the output of iwconfig below:
iwconfig output
Code: Select all
IEEE 802.11abgn ESSID:"Wireless"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:23:69:CF:11:E6
Bit Rate=81 Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=50/70 Signal level=-60 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:362 Missed beacon:0
Wireless Card: Intel Wi-Fi Link 5300 AGN adapter
CPU: 2.5Ghz dual core
Memory: 4GB
Video: Nvidia 9600M GT
Again, any help on speeding up this connection is MUCH appreciated! Thanks in advance!