I have a Dell XPS 420 that's a little over 4 years old, it has a Broadcom 802.11g wireless network adapter in it that hasn't been used in a couple years because the antenna broke, I just bought a new 7dbi wireless wifi antenna booster that fit's. I also just did a "clean" upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 and installed a GTX 560 TI GPU w/ drivers, I'm trying to figure out if the network card is just shot from being out of use for 2+ years, is that possible?

My laptop is on the same wireless connection, in the same room. My laptop's connection status is:

Speed - 36 MBPS
Signal - 2-3 Bars
Sent - 17.5 Million Bytes
Received - 286 Million Bytes

Desktop:

Speed - 54 MBPS
Signal - 4-5 Bars
Sent - 11,500 Bytes
Received - 35,500 Bytes

This just seems strange, it's getting a stronger signal, is this from the new antenna? It's fluctuates a little, sometimes loads a page, next min it CRAWLS along and barely loads anything, much more of the latter. What else could be doing this? A router setting, though I doubt it cause my Xbox 360 runs fine off the router and so does my laptop.

The Desktop has been upstairs directly connected via Ethernet and the internet loaded fine. I just brought the it downstairs today and hooked up the antenna, the labeled speed and signal strength is normal, but the sent/received activity is atrocious. Is there something wrong with the type of antenna? I tried going into safe mode with networking on and still SLOW as a snail. Could this be a driver issue with Windows 7?, I didn't try using it until after the new installations and upgrades but says its driver is up-to-date. Am I missing something, anything I can try to find the problem?

The network adapter itself is only just over 4 years old, could it be on it's last leg already? Any advice or thoughts appreciated.