does your current access point have adjustable aerials?
if so try laying them flat an see if there's a difference.

Have you checked your adapter properties, my Intel card had 'Throughput Enhancement' disabled by default in the (Windows 7) driver (Advanced tab).

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider/ is quite good

It shows the APs and their overlapping channels.

Choose channel 1 6 or 11 and choose one which has the lowest bars

I have over 10 wifi networks available and I still get 144 mbps wireless upstairs from the router. My router only supports 144 mbps though so I can't expect better

Thanks for that. Excellent software, I like the graphics showing how channels overlap.
Thanks also to Petsy who put me onto using AES (I was using TKIP).

- I changed the setup on my router to use WPA2-PSK-AES.

- I then needed to change the properties of each laptop adapter "advanced" settings so they had QoS WMM enabled and anything relating to 802.11n enabled.

- Once that was done I then needed to change the SSID profile settings on each laptop so that they used WPA2-personal and AES.

Rebooted both laptops and bingo! Link speeds now between 130 and 200 on ground floor with a consistent 300 on the first floor. Average consistent network throughput on the ground floor up from around 8,000 Kbps (1 MB/s) to 24,000 Kbps (3 MB/s). Thanks guys!

But, boy, what a palava... I consider myself pretty experienced in computer tech stuff but if this lot can fox me without two days of posting in forums and Googling, how does Joe Ordinary cope??

Because I now know how to set them up now I am going to get a single WLAE-AG300N to act as a bridge for my Squeezebox Duet Receiver as it is bound to get a better signal than with its notoriously poor internal WiFi.

In reply to a post by TheLastMan:

Because I know how to set them up now I am going to get a single WLAE-AG300N to act as a bridge for my Squeezebox Duet Receiver as it is bound to get a better signal than with its notoriously poor internal WiFi.

This is what I did and I am happy to report great success!

The internal wi-fi in the Receiver was struggling to raise 800 kilobits per second using 802.11g. After about an hour of wrangling and hair tearing I set up the Buffalo bridge to pick up the 802.11n connection (at 40 Mhz) from the access point. This is not the easiest device to set up and the manual is pretty rubbish.

However... having finally got the hang of it I connected it to the Receiver (using one of the Ethernet sockets) and it now streams FLAC and WAV files flawlessly.

Just to see how much better it was doing I turned off the wi-fi in my laptop and connected it to the bridge using an Ethernet cable and tested the real-world throughput using "LAN Speed Test" to and from my NAS. This showed 56,000 kb/s (7 MB/s) down and 32,000 kb/s (4 MB/s) up.

Wow. That is seventy times faster than the Receiver's internal wi-fi!!!

In fact the WLAE-AG300N picks up the wireless much better than either of the two new laptops, giving roughly double the real-world network throughput, without an antenna in sight.