A problem with my wireless internet.

I am currently on my laptop, a Dell laptop which I recently had shipped back to Dell for them to ship it back to me with a new Hard Drive. I installed the Hard Drive, and everything was great for about a day and a half. After that time, my speed seemed to shoot down to nothing.

Now, I know that wireless internet won't always be as fast as wired internet, and the closer you get to a wireless router, the faster the internet will be, but my desktop with a wired connect gets 19 mbps on speedtest.com, while this laptop, upstairs, not 50 feet from the router, gets .27 mbps. When I go downstairs, the speed shoots back up to 12 or 13 mbps. I was wondering what my problem could be, whether it's my router that's going to hell, or my wireless card that was somehow broken, or if it's any other problem.

Any help on this subject will be greatly appreciated.

Edit: I should have said that, according to speedtest, my speed is extremely unstable, going from 5 mbps yesterday to .27 when I made this post to about 3 now.

Change the wireless channel in your router settings to something else, preferably 1, 6, or 11. Then remove the lead bars hidden in your ceiling.

But then how will I give cancer to people quickly and easily!?

Edit: According to my router settings crap, because I use Auto 108 Mbps as my mode, I can't change my channel away from 6. Should I change my mode, or should I do something else? I really know nothing about routers XD

Change the mode to b&g, it won't make much difference.

I just want to point out that online speed tests are intended to test your DSL speed, not your local network connection speed. You should be connecting to your router at 54Mbps (assuming your router and network card are G rated), while your DSL connection speed sounds to be around 30Mbps. You can think of your DSL connection as the part between your router and the ISP (i.e. the bit for which your connection must travel through phone lines) and your local area connection is the connection from your router to the computer.

Having said that, it's probably still your local connection causing the speed difference. If you only tried once or twice, it's possible that your network was experiencing intermittency when you were getting slow speeds.
- Does it ALWAYS happen when you're next to your router?
- If you disconnect from your local network and reconnect when you're next to it, what speed does it reconnect at?
- Do you have any cordless phones/microwaves/other sources of radio waves close to your router/computer when downstairs?

EDIT: I just read your posts again, and two things to comment on/correct:
1. "I use Auto 108 Mbps as my mode" - That means you're using N mode, not G as I assumed above, which is totally fine. N is just faster than G.

2. "...according to speedtest, my speed is extremely unstable..." - This raises alarm bells in my head as a DSL issue and not a router issue. Fluctuating speeds COULD be caused by an unstable connection between your router and computer, but in my experience it's far more likely to be caused either by instability in your connection BEFORE it gets to your house, or by equipment you have connected into your phone line at home. 80% of the time it turns out to be unfiltered phone/fax equipment.

You should go around EVERY phone jack in your house, and check: For EVERY plugged-in device (excluding your router), is there a line filter between the device and the phone jack? The reason these are required is because phones and faxes create a lot of whistles, pops and cracks on the phone line (creatively called "noise"), and an ADSL internet connection requires a very quiet line to operate smoothly. Noise on the line is the most common cause of instability in your connection, and will cause your internet to repeatedly drop out.

If that doesn't work then you may need what's called a "port reset" on your connection, which is unfortunately something that your ISP needs to perform so you'd have to speak to them on the phone.

A couple things I forgot to mention...

1. I have High-speed cable internet through Charter

2. I use a Netgear Wireless router. The downstairs computer hooks to the router which is hooked to the modem.

Also, just to rule out this possibility, I stayed at a friend's house yesterday and took my laptop, and my speed was perfectly fine, so I highly doubt it is a problem with my laptop.

As of now, I have changed my mode to B and G and changed my channel to 11. I have checked the internet a few times with Speedtest, and there is much less instability and my speed is consistent around 11. There are still a few peaks and valleys on the tracker thing on the site, which is to be expected, I'll bet. It is, as a whole, 100% better though. Thank you for your help, guys. If it messes up again, I'll be back XD

face: if the speed is good on a hardwired connection, it's not an ISP problem, no matter what other factors come into play. Christ himself can come to you in a vision and tell you that a port reset is necessary, but if the speed is fine when close to the router, let alone wired, then Christ is wrong.

lom: Got any metal or bookshelves between your router and where the notebook is when you have the problem? What a lot of people don't realize is that wifi = RF = electromagnetic radiation, and subject to the same rules. This means it will refract, diffract, and reflect the same way any other EM wave does. For this reason, keep the fricking metal out from between your router and computer. Solid sheets will reflect the RF. even mesh will generate a (weak) electric field when EMR hits it, and EM fields absorb EMR. That's why bluetooth headsets cut out when you pass through an aluminum exterior doorframe. Got the router in a cabinet? Take it out. Hardwood absorbs quite a bit of EMR. (pressboard and plywood not so much) If your router's in a metal cabinet, you've more or less enclosed it in a Faraday cage. Get it out. A lot of people dismiss bookshelves, but paper absorbs more EMR than bulletproof glass of the same thickness, and chances are, your RF waves are hitting the books on the spine and traveling through the thickest part. Lastly, don't forget that the most common form of EMR is light. Your wifi is made of photons. Once you learn to differentiate between reflection and phenomena like absorption, refraction, and diffraction, you can think of your wifi waves in the same terms as light and have a pretty good idea of what's in the way. Reflection is a bugger, though--the colour of materials don't make a lick of difference to RF because the frequency is much too low for the surface texture of most solid objects to reflect a significant amount--so while light won't go through walls, RF will. A handy way to think of it is to imagine a world where everything is transparent, but the same density. Can light get there? Then neither can RF. Would light be dim as hell by the time it got there? Then your wifi signal is going to suck.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1430573797.png

Ugh. Changing the channel helped it for a bit, but it still sometimes dips like this. I have probably 30 feet between me and my router, and the only thing blocking it is a cheap, seemingly low density door. Do you think my router is just going to tit somehow? It is about 3 years old...

Only way to be sure is trial and error--borrow a friend's router and see if there's a noticeable difference. Or just use this as an excuse to buy a new one on spec, so you can get dual-band. The Netgear WNDR3700 comes highly praised by Maximum PC.

In the meantime, keep fiddling with the channels. What you might find is that everything will be great on one channel for a while before it all goes dead again, and changing to another one may temporarily fix the problem until it reoccurs. In short, your router may be on its way out, or your wireless card is on the cheap side.