Curiouser and curiouser. Even with the new wireless router I was getting terrible wifi throughput to my laptop, which is often about 12 feet away from the router. After much stumbling around, I happened to notice that putting the Thinkpad X61 laptop into it’s Max Performance power setting yields terrible wifi throughput, but putting it back into a conservative setting gave full throughput. The difference is immense — about 50KB/s vs my full DSL speed of 700KB/s. A cursory web search did not turn up anyone else with this problem.
So here’s the tradeoff: Sometimes I get slowdowns while watching streaming Netflix on the laptop unless I put it into max performance mode, yet in that mode I can’t stream in realtime.
I can’t wait for the Linux Netflix client so I can watch this on my HTPC.