Internet speed; Lost connection; Upgrade to Windows 2000?

[lannybudd]

I have a 765XD and a 380ED, using a Beklin 10/100 network card and a Lucent Gold Orinoco wireless card for internet connection. With both I get a connection speed averaging about 2MBPS, though with my USB wired connection on my 4 year old Windows XP laptop (non-IBM, a cheap brand, the 10/100 connection broke and I use a USB connection) I get slightly under 6 MBPS and with my new ASUS EEE with a built-in 10/100 connection I get a little under 10MBPS wired or unwired. Why the difference in speed?

Though using the wireless connection on the Thinkpads is reliable (I don't use a wireless connection, not trusting its security, and so test the Thinkpads elsewhere), when I use my wired connection and the Belkin PCMCIA Network Card I must always set it up again anew each time I turn on the computer, the settings for some reason getting lost. I believe this is only with the 765XD. Why is this connection not maintained?

Thanks to all. Incidentally I use these Thinkpads to play around with though the keyboards are excellent and for 10 year old (or so) machines they're doing fine. Though, of course, I resent (as do all of us) the inability to boot up from the CD drive and lack of USB porting (The boot from CD disk software seems awfully complicated to use and when I tried LINUX live CDs recently on my more modern laptop, thinking of porting LINUX to the Thinkpads, none picked up my Brother printer and with one the mouse didn't work and these were major discos, including KNOPPIX. But the ASUS overlayed Linux OS is a delight)

I upgraded the machines from Windows 95 to Windows 98SE. What are your thoughts about further upgrade to Windows 2000? I have only 90 meg RAM on one (max is 104), 80 meg RAM on the other (max is 80), and both have HDs of 2.1GB.

[leoblob]

I vote "no" on the WIN2K upgrade for those machines.

I had WIN2K on the i1452 in my sig (haven't updated it yet), and it was a pig... very slow... with a 366MHz Celeron and 256megs of RAM.

Unless 98SE won't let you do something you need to do, I personally would stick with it.

[Stan]

A bit more information about your router may help. Those that come with USB and RJ45 connections are just USB modems with a LAN port, they are not proper routers.

Does this router connect by USB, LAN and wireless?

Win98 isn't very good with USB, it can be convinced to work with basic LAN networking with some effort, but wireless networking needs a whole lot more effort and some up to date hardware and well written drivers and configuration utilities, in my experience.

[lannybudd]

Thanks to all.

The router is a Linksys of a few years back and works fine with the direct 10/100 connection on my Windows XP desktop and ASUS EEE; the 10/100 connection with my Thinkpads is through a 16bit PCMCIA Card, as is the wireless connection (which I get from a neighbor's connection, not one in my home), the speed with both being about 2MB/s which is a third the speed of my USB Windows XP laptop connection and a little more than 1/5th the speed of what I get with my desktop and ASUS 10/100 direct connection (not via a USB or a PCMCIA Card).

[lannybudd]

I figured out the problem. The anti-virus was slowing things drastically and likely interefered with the connection. I removed the antivirus, stopped using Firefox (I only have 90meg RAM), went back to IE6 (not permitting flash or activeX or Java to be used), and deleted unused programs which automatically load (as OpenOffice). The operations now speed along. I just use this machine for play, not doing business/entering passwords on it.