Solved: wireless painfully slow

In one bedroom we have a just over a year old dell desktop computer with Vista. Has a modem going to it. I have put in a Netgear wireless g router to use in the other bedroom with my much older (3-4 years?) dell laptop with XP. At my mom's house the laptop works pretty well with her wireless. It's older and only has 1 GB ram, but I can get online with reasonable speeds. However, in this house it's horrible! It started off ok when I first set it up, not really fast, but tolerable, but then something went crazy with the modem and we had to exchange it and a second modem as well. We're on a third modem which looks completely different from the other 2 modems, but internet works great on the desktop now. Very fast.
The lptop is horrible though. It's actually worse than dial up. It take forever to load a page and sometimes just doesn't. That's with internet explorer 8. When I tried Firefox it was even worse, completely unusable.
I use the laptop about 20 feet away from the desktop and router. Is there a way to make it go faster at this house??
Also, when it connects, the signal shows all green for every bar. But then after a while it will drop the connection and try to connect to the other wireless signals in the area that only have 0 or 1 bars.

 

Have you tried plugging the laptop into the modem? If it's old i'm curious about your laptops health. My laptop connection is generally fast, but can slow to a crawl if I strain it too much.

If the bars are low on your neighbours connections maybe there's something in your house. Anything to do with sound waves, microwaves, radio waves, electromagnetic waves, etc. Do you play a stereo in you bedroom for eg?

 

Download and run this Xirrus Wi-Fi Inspector, click the Networks link on the upper left and paste a screen shot of that screen here. Note that this application requires NET Framework to run. If you get an error about a missing function, download and install NET Framework.


To post a screen shot of the active window, hold the Alt key and press the PrtScn key. Open the Windows PAINT application and Paste the screen shot. You can then use PAINT to trim to suit, and save it as a JPG format file. To upload it to the forum, open the full reply window and use the Manage Attachments button to upload it here.

 

Hopefully I did this right. I've tried plugging in the laptop to the modem, but can't get it to work. I've unplugged the cordless phone, we do have a tv. I've taken the security off the router and even tried changing the channel.

 

I tried channel 1 and it was the same, but then tried channel 11 and it's much better. Not as fast as it usually is, but I can handle this Thank you!!!