Wireless card problems

[noneyet]

Hey guys
I am having some trouble with my wireless card, hope fully the vast knowadge base on GT can help me. Anyways I have a speedstream wirless network card (802.11b) and I have never had any problems with it untill now. I am away for school and they put me up in a hotel, I can connect to the hotels wireless network with no problem but randomly get kicked off somehow.

The network is really slow (when I look at my bandwith usage on the meter in the task manager I have only used 5% at the most even when I down load a lot of stuff at once). Sometimes I just loose connectivity even though the computer has not moved and sometimes it seems that things just lock up. Also when this happens the CPU useage goes to to 85-95%

If i put the cursor over the icon next to the time, the detail box comes up very slow and choppy, and I can no longer connect to the web even though It says I have excellent strength.

When I disable and reenable the network card all is fine again somtimes as well as just hitting the repair button (windows never detects a problem with the connection). BUT sometime I get a fatal error message and sometims a blue sceen and the computer restarts. When I do the error report it says it may be a driver issue but it does not know which one. I have not installed any drivers recently so I dont know what it could be.

I am runing a dell inspiron 8200 windows XP home with SP2 and as far as i know all updates. I am running IE 6 and Firefox 1.06 both have the same issues.

Is it possible that my network card is giving up the ghost, I have never had this issue before on my home network or any other network but nobody else in the hotel seems to be suffering from these problems (except the slowness).

Sorry for the long post but I wanted to give as much detail up front as i could thanks for any help you can give me

[srhoades]

My guess would be some spyware running in the background eating up your bandwith.

[noneyet]

I thought that too but I just ran Ad aware, Spybot, Mcaffe virus scan that checks for spyware (corporate 9.0)all with the lates updates and Trend Micro House call all came back absoloutly clean. Also a bandwith test found that I was communicating at 249kbs but I think that that is because of the slow hotel connection.

[srhoades]

Well, its probably just the Hotel. They could be doing something dumb like sharing 1 dsl connection for the whole place or it could be not enough wireless nodes to keep a strong connection.

One more thing I thought of sine I re-read your post and you stated no one else was having this problem. If the router they are using is a G router, even though they are backward compatible with b some routers and cards have trouble negotiating with each other.

[noneyet]

Thanks for the insight, I will see if I can find out what type of router they are running, and if that is the case I guess I will just have to live with it or buy a new card...