Slooow wireless

[motorcity909]

My son has an XP machine in his room connecting to our network wirelessly via a Netgear USB adaptor. It doesn't achieve the max 56mbps but it's quick enough to play games online. Recently, the machine has become increasingly unstable, going through a reboot cycle 3 or 4 times before actually booting up and auto-rebooting if any lengthy process takes place on it (like running an anti-virus scan).

He's been using my Ubuntu machine more and more as it is very stable and is on a wired connection so there is no lag on his online gaming.

I booted his XP machine into Ubuntu with a Live CD which seemed to work fine, including the wireless connection. I went ahead a did a dual install of Ubuntu 9.04 alongside XP. The installation went fine and Ubuntu is running fine.

At first, the wireless connection was fine but shortly after, although connecting, it isn't enough to even load Google, never mind an online game. It also means I've been unable to download all the latest updates or install some extra software for him.

There was no other machine using the wireless at the same time (in the past, his machine and my other sons netbook have happily shared the wireless, both on online games).

I've deleted the connection and set it back up again, I've pulled the USB adaptor out and plugged back in, I've rebooted the machine = still just a crawl.

Any help will be much appreciated. If there are any terminal outputs needed, I'll happily post those tomorrow.

Thanks in advance.

[motorcity909]

Quick update. The machine wouldn't boot at all today nor would it let me reinstall XP.

I've ended up installing Ubuntu on the entire hd and dumping XP - rock solid and stable machine now. Wireless was fine at first but this evening it's slowed to a crawl again, not even Google loading.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[sendblink23]

I've noticed the same exact issue, at first connection being fine... but later on... blop *its like suppose internet connection - because no pages will load. (all though it says you do have internet connection)

no clue how to resolve it.

All I do know is - If I want internet connection instead of using the usb netgear... I'll just use the ethernet lan connection, or boot with the live cd in which the internet works perfectly fine with the usb netgear.

So I assume something is going wrong after installing the OS.(from Live cd connection is perfectly fine, after installing it... it goes *blop dead)

[motorcity909]

Briefly thought last night it was interference from Xbox wireless controllers but it's all academic now as the machine is dead; hardware issues so XP or Ubuntu, it's dead!