I'm havng a similar problem. The wireless system (Dell Inspiron 8000 running WinXP) on my network connects at 130 consistently. However, if I reboot the router while that system is connected, it will come back up at 270. Rebooting the router daily is the only way I can obtain the higher speed connection. It used to connect at 270 when the computer booted, but no longer. The only change is that I had to move the network card to the second PCMCIA slot to allow the addition of an external USB 2.0 card to support an external backup drive as the old Dell doesn't have USB 2.0 built in.