I ran a test on www.speedtest.net on another, better laptop, and came up with about 7.5 MBps (yes, bytes). Mine has never seen much over 2 MBps on anything. Is there something in the nature of the computer that could be keeping my downloads at slower speeds than the network supports?
Definitely could be. The speed and quality of your downloads is determined by 1: the speed and quality of your internet service and 2: the capabilities of the network card on your computer. Most computers just use the motherboard’s network capabilities for wired connection, i.e. an ethernet cable, but for a wireless connection, most computers need a seperate wireless networking card. This card has a built-in antennae and the chipset needed to process data. Here are some commercially available wireless networking cards for laptops - you will notice that most are rated to the same rate of data transfer, but that there are a few outliers that are faster or slower.