slooow! internet

I recently purchased an aspire 533 along with the sprint wirless service. The os is windows 7 home prem. The wireless card is a sierra 250u usb. The net is really slow.Slower than dial up. Its also slow when I use the internal wireless card at local hot spots, but not as bad. I deleated and reloaded the sprint software and changed usb ports. I loaded the software and card on a dell laptop and it ran just great. On both laptops my signal strenght was 2 bars. I'am thinking that it could be the drivers or the internal card but doesn't the sprint card override the internal card? Acer wants over $100 to look at the problem eventhrough it's under warranty. Any ideas?

 

I'm bumping this thread because I am experiencing a similar problem. It's particularly annoying because I have a deadline coming up in the next few days.

In my case, I am running both Windows 7 Starter 32bit and Ubuntu 11.04 natty 64bit. At home On Ubuntu I can connect to a local hotspot, but it disconnects sporadically in addition to being slow as molasses even while sitting right next to the wireless router. In the class room on Ubuntu I can't even connect period. In the class room, Windows 7 connects, but that's not what I want. I want to use Ubuntu. And there is no router in the class room for me to plug my Ethernet wire into.

It's a brand new Acer Aspire One 533 series PAV01 with 2 GBs of ram. I followed Swarvey's instructions here:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=24268&hilit=aao+drivers+look+here+first

I get stuck at step 6 because "Linux" isn't an option. The only download options on Acer's official drivers website are Windows 7 and Windows XP. I'm mighty pissed.

Is there any other way to improve my wireless connection?