Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop 1 mbps wireless for all routers

[Taso]

Hello~

I've been having a problem for a while now that I cannot seem to fix, and am fairly sure I caused at some point messing with services.msc

Anyway, my laptop, an Inspiron 1520 laptop with a 1390 WLAN wireless card will not connect well with any router. It will connect with a signal strength relative to the distance from the router physically, but it will always be a speed of 1 mbps, leaving me unable to open any web page or AIM or what not.

I've updated my wireless card drivers and I've been moved from my campus to one house for a week, to another two houses in the span of a day, and two more houses after that. So I've had a significant test base on this.
While everyone else's laptops have functioning wireless, mine does not.
I have tried changing router channels and messed with other router settings, but I have to assume the problem is on MY end, since it's localized to my laptop among all of the locations I've been.
I've tried turning off my firewall, which hasn't fixed anything of course.
Tried turning off WZC and using the Dell wireless manager, tried the opposite. Neither works.

I've tried an enormous amount to fix the problem, scouring google for days, but the only way I can connect to the internet is via a physical ethernet connection(which is fast and wonderful in nearly all cases).



If you need any other pertinent data, I can supply it.
I'm not horribly tech savvy, but I'm also not awful with my laptop(to the point that I've been messing with services.msc without too much fear)

Any suggestions on my end aside from an old/faulty wireless card?

Thank you

 

[Saga Lout]

You could eliminate the Services from the list of suspects by borrowing a USB wireless dongle to see if that behaves the same but frankly, I doubt it will.

For my money, the settings you changed are more likely to be in the configuration of the wireless adapter itself - including the channel setting.

 

[Taso]

I've already uninstalled and re-installed the driver for it, which rolled back the settings to their default state a few days ago. It didn't help.

I've read something along the lines of:
"You cannot change channel on the Wi-Fi client. The client follows the
channel set by the wireless router. Change it only in the wireless
router and the client automatically follow." - regarding the channel on my card's side, however there is an IBSS channel option in the card's configuration menu.

I've tried setting it to the same channel as the one router I have access to(the other routers are elsewhere) and it didn't work.
Perhaps it's something else?

Or should I list all of the settings my wireless adapter has set to enable/disable as it currently is?

 

[TerryNet]

Make sure you have the latest wireless driver from Dell's web site.

Then try TCP Optimizer.

 

[Taso]

I've updated my wireless card drivers and...

Yes.

EDIT:
A new development, I got my hands on a USB wireless adapter to see if that would fare better, and while the program that it utilizes(It's a Belkin wireless manager) didn't pick up any networks, the WZC connected using the USB adapter and it worked fine.

So, it's something wrong with either my wireless card hardware-side or I have some screwed up settings on it.

Either way, I can fix the problem by just buying a USB wireless adapter if I really wanted.
Still, I'm curious to see if there's a fix available to avoid that, even though it wouldn't be awful to spend the money.

 

[Saga Lout]

The process of elimination pays off sometimes. Enter the Service Tag reference you'll find printed somewhere on the machine, into the relevant box at Dell's driver download site and you'll be given the precise driver for the equipment that was installed into your computer. Only if that doesn't cure it will you need to buy a dongle.