[barnt]

Several months ago I was running Talisman firmware but got tired of its laggy interface and random reboots. I went back to the latest stock linksys firmware.

Everything was fine for about a month until about 2 days ago when I realized that the wireless wasn't connecting all the time and it was slower downloading.

Thinking it was the firmware I flashed dd-wrt. This was the first time using it and I must say I'm impressed and will continue using it. But, my problems are still here.

So heres the run down:
My wired pc speed tests the net at ~6mbps and my laptop (and router of course) are set at 54. When doing a speed test on my laptop, I only get ~4mbps, and once I plug it into the ethernet it acts just like the pc.

The biggest problem is packet loss and high pings at close range. I know my laptop is not the problem as my roomates does the same thing. When I ping the router it sometimes times out and other times it will jump to 20-200ms when there is no traffic. Plugged in pinging the router its always <1ms. Even at this close distance the dd-wrt status page shows a low signal (around 50-70). Just going to the other room the signal drops into the 20-30's.

It wasn't like this before so I'm not sure if its fried or what. I've tried boosting the output to its max and that didn't matter. Could it be becuase I have too many neighbors all of the sudden with wifi (I have 9 in the survey page)? I've tried changing the channel the router is on and none made any difference. What else could I try?