earlier. I did fix the issue but I had to do little more than what I did in Arch Linux. In case if you have the same wireless card (Intel 3945ABG) and looking for a solution for slow net speed, I have it for you. And if you don’t have the same card or problem but still want to know how I solved the problem, please continue reading.

This solution is for Linux Mint 5 but will work for Ubuntu 8.04 too. Please update your system before you proceed.

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I don’t do much distro hopping. I’d rather like to have a stable system then jumping from one disto to other distro every other day. Yeah, I know many people who do that. May be it makes them cool (well, at least they think it does!). Anyway that’s a different story. But I hopped 5 different distros in last 3 months due to one single reason: slow Internet speed.

My laptop has Intel 3945ABG wireless card and it is my primary means of getting online. I have Comcast 6mbps Internet connection and I get above 700Kbps on my Windows system. I used to get same speed on Ubuntu until I upgraded to 8.04. After upgrade my 6mbps became 256kbps. First I thought that it could be due to IPV6. So I disabled IPV6. But it did not help. Therefore I decided to try other distros and tried (in order) Mint, SUSE, Fedora 9, Arch(present distro).  Whats surprizing is that all of them having same problem. Then it struck my mind that it could be due to driver issue. So I stared searching for 3945ABG linux driver and found that kernel 2.6.24 and up comes with Intel wifi drivers for linux(iwl3945). I went to distrowatch and found that Ubuntu 7.10 shipped with kernel 2.6.20 and 8.04 comes with 2.6.24. Same kernel with other distros I tried. But before 2.6.24 kernel, ipw3945 drivers were used. As far as I remember, Ubuntu 7.10 used ndiswrapper for wireless driver.

Therefore I decided to use windows driver with ndiswrapper to conform my doubts. I removed ‘iwlwifi-3945-ucode’ package, blacklisted iwl3945, and loaded ndiswrapper and driver. After reboot I connected to my wireless network and guess what? My net speed is back on track. I have not tried this on Ubuntu yet. Once I do, I’ll post a tutorial on it.

OK, before you bombard me with replies, this is NOT my review. This one is by some idiot (or by someone who was being funny) on Amazon. If you don’t believe me then take a look by yourself.

“Worst OS”? acceptable. BUT “Worst game”!? A person with 4 years of computing experience can’t differentiate between OS and game? What was he thinking before buying the product at the first place? Surprisingly 122 of 389 people found the review helpful.. :O Well, I found that review to be helpful too in a way that it made my day.. :p