Thinkpad t43 vs Thinkpad x41 wireless reception

[netcomrade]

I have just moved into a townhouse in N.VA, and I have a linksys WRT54GL router.

The router is on a second floor, and the x41 works flawlessly a floor below... However, the T43 is horrible.. I started a ping there and after about 4000 pings more than 10 percent is packet loss. You'd think that a smaller laptop would do better, but apparently not.. The only thing different between laptops, is at some point the ThinkPad wireless software got busted on it for some reason, and it relies on whatever windows comes with.

I am about to try wwrt software on my linksys, but my last experience with it was actually negative, both laptops maintained better connectivity with the original Linksys software back in NYC where I tried it.

Any clue?

-andrey

[sugo]

Do the thinkpads have intel or atheros wifi cards?

[netcomrade]

The t43 is Intel for sure..

Since the word 'atheros' is not familiar to me, and I started at those network screens plenty over the past few years, I am pretty sure the x41 is using an Intel adapter as well.

[bill bolton]

Which specific Intel wifi cards do you have installed in each ThinkPad and what is the WiFi card driver version on each Thinkpad?

Cheers,

Bill B.

[netcomrade]

OK, since I had some issue today where I lost signal on both laptops, I went ahead and installed wwrt.

I can say that the T43 seems to be doing better, however, I do still get occasional disconnects, and occasional packet loss (not acceptable in my line of work).

I can't really attribute my better experience to dd-wrt maybe I am just using a different channel.

t43 is
Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG
driver version 9.0.1.21
x40 (oops, did I say x41 earlier?)
Intel PRO/Wireless 2200
driver version 9.0.2.31

Wow.. if anything the T should've had later drivers.. I'll try updating.

[netcomrade]

update:

While updating firmware driver, something broke completely :) I think those dd-wrt problems that I had before came back, as neither laptop would work anymore

After some struggling with the router, I've installed the latest dd-wrt v23SP2, confirmed that the x40 was still working (b/c the T43 refused to go online wireless), updated/rolled back drivers multiple times, but in the end I re-created the profile and it all worked (WEP keys stayed the same, but i guess something got busted).

If you don't hear from me in this thread, all is well.. but all this fuss most likely would've been fixed by a driver update, as some have pointed out.

BTW, the drivers wouldn't download from IBM's site (via software installer/system updater), I had to go to the intel site to download the latest driver. WIndows Update wouldn't pick it up either.