Orinoco_pci performance problems

Weird behavior of my Orinoco_pci wireless network interface. On my home 802.11b network, I get performance of about 600KB/s, instead of 1.1MB/s, which should be the approximate speed to expect to. Not only that, but browsing to external websites and the likes (I compare using wget), I get speeds of <7KB/s, and sometimes decreasing to a stall, on a 2Mb/s line. My desktop reaches speeds of >150KB/s, so I could either point at my wireless router/AP, or my wireless NIC. Using PCMCIA RTL8180 802.11b NIC, and using it with NDISwan drivers, I’ve got speeds of above 150KB/s, which points at my built-in Orinoco wireless interface.

I’ve tried downloading the newer orinoco driver, 0.15rc4 (instead of my existing 0.15rc2), and got similar results. I got stalled a bit later (testing with 18MB zip file), but it could be random point, just as well. Using the PCMCIA, it worked correctly *ALL* times. Pity. I will have to pay the “price”, regarding battery life, and extra accessories, regarding wireless for now. I might try this same test with some other router/AP sometime, when I get near one of those.