Internet problem on brand new computer

Question

Hello Dell Networking Forum!

I'm having a networking/internet connectivity problem.

Problem:
Computer internet connectivity is ridiculously slow.
It also times out or drops. Downloading a 5M file never
completes because the thing is so slow and then it times out.
Once it thought the file completed but it had just timed out.

Scenario:

I just received an XPS M140. All I did was unpack it, turn
it on, and try to connect to the internet in the following ways:

1) Connect to a broadband router (connected to DSL) wirelessly
2) Connect to a broadband router (connected to DSL) via Ethernet cable
2) Connect directly to DSL.

And I'm still seeing the problem. I've tried the following:
1) Disable Wireless and Bluetooth
2) Recreate the PPoE broadband connection.
3) Turned off all services and their startup.
4) Disabled my regular LAN adapter but the PPoE one relies on this
so I had to reenable it. Interestingly, the LAN adapter will
go into an error state, but the internet is still accessible,
albeit very very slow.

Note also that the other computers on the network, work
fine. I have a Dell Axim and even that is faster than the
brand new XPS M140.

Any Ideas? I'm sure this is some configuration thing with the laptop
that I haven't found.

It's running Windows Media Center Edition (as packaged by Dell).
Some HW stats:

- Intel PRO 2200 Internal Wireless (802.11b/g,54Mbps) Inspiron 630M/ XPS M140
- Internal Dell Wireless 350 Bluetooth for Inspiron 630m/XPS M140
- Internal 56K Modem and Integrated Network Card

Any Ideas?

Thanks!

TWSG · Answer

Fro what I understand you are getting network connectivity ,are you running any dell wireless utilities that show your connect speed?  Also, if you double click your current connection in your network connections, does it tell you what speed your running at?  It's suprising that it's slow both with wireless and on the wired connection.  I also don't know for sure about Dell NIC's, but I have seen where if your NIC speed was set for Auto-negotiate it sometimes slows your connection down to a crawl.    You should be able to find this speed in Device manage under the network adapter properties.

TWSG · Answer

Good, I am glad it worked out for you.  I don't think that Windows has a 'built in' connection manager for a wireless connection with Windows XP.  I use the Dell Wireless utility and find that I need that to even find an access point within range and conenct.  Have a nice day!

xpsmer · Answer

Thanks for the information! I didn't get a chance to
try what you suggested but I did manage to resolve this.

It turns out that I was using Windows to manage my wireless connection
instead of the Intel Wireless Pro software. When I tried again,
the wireless adapter failed to find a network. After about an
hour of debugging the router and changing the network security settings,
I realized it was my computer that wasn't connecting and not my network
being down. (Found this out by connecting the Axim to the wireless network.)

Then after playing with the wireless adapter for a while, trying
to get it to turn on, I managed to disable it so that windows no longer
managed the card. Then when I searched for networks, it told me that
windows wasn't managing the softare and to either turn on the windows
wireless service (Windows Zero Wireless or something like that) or use
the vendor's softare. I checked the windows service and it was indeed stopped.
(Start->Run->"msconfig"->services)

So I decided to check out the Intel Wireless Pro software. After
about five minutes of playing around with that (trying to get
it to talk to my secure network) it connected. Signal strength came
back excellent and it was as if the emergency break was released because
it took off flying after that. Normal speed internet. At last.

For some reason, this was also affecting my LAN adapter. Don't know why.
But it's currently disabled. As long as it works, I'm happy. After
a while I'll get up the courage to debug that thing, but I think it was
just a matter of Windows managing my wireless card.

Thanks for the help!

Networking, Internet, & Bluetooth

Internet problem on brand new computer

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