Eureka I think I found it.
I stuggled with this for days. The new driver from Intel helped. I had to uninstall first then run their program. That got it better (from riduculous to totally unacceptable). But it seemed the only real difference was that the driver was less willing to admit to a disconnect. It was still way slower than my Thinkpad t60. In fact when I played music on myspace it would constantly drop out. And when I tried to attend emeetins at work it would disconnect every 5 or 10 minutes. So again, the driver was less willing to admit defeat but it was clear the hardware was not keeping up,
What I noticed though is this thing worked better at work than here. And then I realized my old 802,11b router at home was relatively ancient, and it was obvious from looking at the driver settings on the W500 they had stuff in there to deal with 802.11n which is much faster.
So I went out and paid $60 for a new Linksys 802.11n router figuring I could return it. Well it has made a huge difference so it's clear this stuff didn't get tested well against old hardware. Run myspace music player again and NO drop outs. Tomorrow when I dial into emeetings again I expect to see an improvement there too because the 802.11n is just much faster anyway.
So botttom line, my old laptop worked well with the old router. My new laptop sucks with the old router. Try for yourself. You can always return your router.
I will post back if I determine this victory is shortlived.
