Differing broadband speeds on two laptops?

Hiya all,

My girlfriend and I both use laptops on the same home wireless network which is provided by Sky. My laptop, a HP G7000 consistantly shows download speeds of between 3.5 to 5.5 Mb but my girlfriends Lenovo N500 struggles to get anything over 1 Mb. Sky says our line is set to 12Mb.

Does anybody have any idea why hers is so much slower? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Old wireless card drivers? Same physical location? I can double the throughput on my laptop running wirelessly simply by rotating it 90 degrees.

Regards,
Steve

Is your girlfriend's laptop using 802.11b as opposed to g?

Thanks for your replies. We tried plugging the laptop into the router directly and got speeds around 11.8mb. We also updated her drivers but that didn't help. We have ended up buying a 54Mb USB dongle for £15.00 and she's getting speeds around 8Mb now.