E4200 - Slow bandwidth

Question

Don't be fooled by all the PC component review websites out there that have only taken a cursory look at the E4200. After seeing all of those I was convinced it was great, but once I got here to Amazon and saw the less-than-stellar product rating and the number of negative reviews others were leaving, I suddenly became hesitant (Amazon reviews with more than a couple of people reviewing it tend to be pretty reliable), but desperate for a router that would finally stop my problems with range issues and dropping connections I took the plunge anyway.
And now I sincerely regret it. All the negative Amazon reviews were completely valid - while it does have great range and I don't have connection drops, my speeds are noticeably slower, sometimes pages inexplicably fail to load (Even though the network is still connected) and forget about streaming anything whatsoever if you're on a device that only supports the 2.4GHz band (These same devices with which I had *no problem whatsoever* streaming anything previously except for the fact that my connection would drop every 4 hours or so and require a power cycling of the router). And for the excessive price of this thing, it is absolutely not worth it. This thing is supposed to be top-of-the-line, best-of-the-best perfect and it is anything but. I spent days trying different configurations, upgrading firmware, everything, but the problems persisted.
I'd probably give it a solid three star review if it were priced at least $50 lower than what it's at because the range it gives is definitely more than any other router I've used, but with this premium price, I expect it to be amazing. It isn't.

Answer 1

First of all please verify that you have got a 802.11n card in your computer. New generation routers (i.e. E4200) speaks an entirely different language than 802.11g cards, so while those adapters can work with the E4200 for example, they are not optimized to work with it. It is like having to translate from one language to another in real time when going from N to G... So in those cases the old router will show a stronger signal than the new one.
SECOND, make sure the adapter driver is up to date.
Try to do the following steps:
A] With the help of Cisco Connect Software (if at all you have installed the router with the help of this software)
          1] Open the software and go to the option which says "Router Settings"
          2] Then click on the option which says "Advanced Settings" which will take you to the router's configuration page.
         3] Then go to the Wireless tab, keep network mode as mixed,
 For Channel Settings of 2.4 GHz you can make Channel Width to 20 MHz only and Channel to 6, 9, 11..
 For Channel Settings of 5 GHz you can make Channel Width to 20 MHz only and Channel to 40 or 161...
B] If you haven't installed Cisco Connect then you can log on to the router's user interface using it's default IP address in the browser which is 192.168.1.1 and type in 'admin' as the password leaving the username field blank. This will take you to the router's web interface and then follow steps as mentioned above to make the changes.