Thinkpads Forum

I have a W700, with the 5300 wireless card, as shipped from Lenovo. Machine was shipped with Vista but was given the free upgrade by Lenovo a year or so ago.

I have been troubled by mediocre to slow wireless performance (internet use) since new.

I am fully upgraded to the latest of everything. Drivers, updates etc from lenovo.

I have tried to strip the machine of Access connections, and tried to let windows control the wireless instead of Access connections.
I have hidden away in a remote location... with every circuit breaker in the house turned off except for the cable modem, the router power and the power adaptor for the laptop. This is to eliminate interference.

An new HP laptop, a new iMac and an old thinkpad R40 with a wireless card in the PCMCIA slot - They ALL scream along fine with an old linksys abg router. My W700 is dog slow compared to them all.

I just got an airport express "n" as an attempt to test if this thing can ever be fast.
It was equally slow as before, I even returned the airport expres and got another to make sure it is not a defective airport express.

I use this site to check the speed. I find it give results that match my performance perfectly. http://infospeed.verizon.net/speedtest

if I plug the Ethernet into my laptop directly from the cable modem the infospeed test give me consistent 2M results, with an occasional 4M and a rare 6M result also it sometimes give a 1.5M but that is rare also. With the laptop on the same table as the router, I move the Ethernet cable to the router and connect wirelessly, and the speed drops It is rare to get 1.5m, and about every second time I click retest, (or just F5) the results is down to double ISDN...

I have tried everything I can think of, I have tried every combination of setting of the advanced tab of the device properties for the wireless card in device manager. I have put everything to factory default setting. I have uninstalled/reinstalled, all drivers and software. About all I have left to do is wipe the hard drive and reload windows but that is a pain. I will if there is some hope of success.
At the moment I have the airport express forced to connect in “n” mode only. And the speed is slow but has not dropped to a crawl in a while but still not even close to what the cable modem is delivering.
This 5300 Card is supposed to be good, an upgrade, but man I just cant make it work.
Open to ideas...

Bojangles, I have the same laptop with the same WiFi card, and have no such problems under Vista. I use mainly 802.11n, with channel bonding (40 MHz channel), at 5GHz with a DLink DGL-4500 wireless router. I also use it without channel bonding (20 MHz channel), at 2.4GHz with a Buffalo wireless router (I don't have the model # handy).

The theoretical connection speed I see when connected at 5GHz is 300Mbps although, practically speaking, the real-world speed is probably more like 100Mbps. I consistently get about 6Mbps in real-world transfers using my DSL connection via WiFi, which is the limit of my current DSL service.

I've read many reports of problems with Lenovo's wireless drivers under Windows 7, with many W-series laptops, although probably none like your story. Search the Lenovo forums for more info. In general, the W700/5300 combo outperforms Mac WiFi, because Macs only use 2 WiFi antennas, whereas the 5300 card uses 3. That's about all I can tell you. Click here for the inside dirt about WiFi on notebooks/netbooks.

Good luck!