Horrible wireless performance on Inspiron 6000.

Wireless performance on my Inspiron 6000, with 2GHz Pentium M, 2GB memory, 802.11a/b/g support is very low. Even though my connection states 54Mbps, it is far worse than what I was able to get out of my plain old 802.1b ORiNOCO PCMCIA card on an older laptop with hardware several times slower than that of my new system. Performance is so bad that I experience considerable delays during normal browsing, remote desktop usage, not to mention file transfer.

 

Is this a known problem? I faintly recall once reading somebody reporting his Intel 2915 abg frequently losing connection. Is the internal antenna on this model perhaps too weak? Is there a way to resolve this issue without replacing anything or buying an external PCMCIA wireless adapter?