Please help - this is driving me nuts!!!

Am connecting to home network via laptop. "Home network" is a 512k upstream ADSL broadband through a Solwise SAR-703a modem/router. We have a 3Com 10baseT small office hub which links 3 PCs to the modem/router. Cabling is CAT5 throughout.

Laptop is an IBM T40, and I'm using the on-board wired NIC "Intel(R) Pro/1000 MT Mobile Connection". The routerwas fairly cheap and nasty (at the time) so we're manually configuring our IP as DHCP doesn't appear to work.

The problem is that the internet connection from this laptop is incredibly slow. Painfully slow, infact. As slow as when we used to share a 33k modem between 4 people - no joke At first I thought it was my housemates hogging bandwidth with P2P apps, but now am not so sure. I unplugged everyone else from the router and it didn't help all that much (although there was a slight improvement). Worse still, it seems that I can only download small chunks of info in any one session. e.g. I downloaded a manual for the router earlier - it took about 20 attempts to get the whole PDF file - and it's only 1.4MB. It downloads a small bit then seems to hang. I try again and it downloads some more then hangs again.

It has worked better than this before, but not 100% sure what happened. One thing I did do which may have messed it up is to write a .reg file to set my manual IP for when I get home from work. It didn't work as expected so I didtched it. Connection has worked since then, but am wondering if that screwed stuff up (will replace the original backup and see if it helps). Meantime I have reinstalled NIC but with no joy.

It's killing me. I can barely open eBay

Anyone got any ideas????

Cheers,
Dan.