You should keep in mind, your wired connection with any linksys switch is going to be 100mbps, possibly 200mbps but I can't remember off the top of my head if all of the support full-duplex mode. Your average wireless G connection is going to give you in theory 54mbps max and the more people are connected the less your going to get. Unlike a switched network, each connection on wireless does not get 54mbps, you have to divide it up between users, if I'm remembering correctly.
Its been a while since I studied the wireless protocols and tweaks vendors do to it to max out the speed, so if any of this is wrong/out of date forgive my ignorance.

Anyways, the best wired connection is always going to be better than the best wireless connection. So if your looking for the best speed and don't need to be free of wires, I suggest going wired as opposed to wireless.

Just my two cents.

- Kawauso

Andrew O'Brien wrote:

I just discovered that my WIFI downloads are much slower than mu
ethernet downloads. Two very similar Emachines desptops with 2.6 gHz
CPUs, ethernet PC with 1 Gig RAM and the WiFi PC has 2 gigs of RAM.
The reported wireless connections speed is "excellent". The 2 PCS are
about 15 feet apart, on the same floor. The WRT54GS is new, replacing
a BEFSR41 WAP54G combination. The slow WIFI may have been an issue
before, not sure...my son used to always complain that his PC (the
wifi one) was slower than in the days when it too was ethernet but I
thought it was his imagination. Today I downloaded a file that seemed
slow, I downloaded it again on the ethernet PC and it was 3-4 times
faster. I repeated the test with other files from different sites,
same outcome.

Any ideas? Time to go back to Ethernet ?

Andy