Well after a lot of pulling out of hair and chasing red herrings, I have finally found out what my problem is and you wont believe it either. The problem is going to try and convince the company I bought my laptop from that the problem is there at all.
A quick background..........I have had really slow internet for a while now. I thought I had found the problem yesterday in the setting of Firefox, but know. I bought a wifi extender, sort of helped, but not completely. I thought that it was a sight problem with my router. I could only get a good surfing speed with line of site with the router. To get line of site involved moving to a different chair in my front room. I have tried everything I could think of and surfed the subject to death. Well last night, my wife noticed that all was running fine and then when the battery alarm came on, she plugged the laptop in to charge. The internet slowed to a crawl. Further investigation proved that when the laptop is plugged into the mains, there is something happening to the Wifi, interference or a hardware glitch. I did a quick test and went to downloads, found a nice large file. Laptop on battery and I have a good 200kbs. As the addon was downloading, I plugged in the mains power, after a few seconds, the speed dropped of to single figure download speed. Unplugged and after a few second, the speed was back up to around 200kbs. Plugged it aback in, down it went. This could be repeated as often as I wanted, the same result. Some web surfing and my online email for example was the same. Power on, forever to load, battery, a second to load. So am going mad? Could this be a power management software problem, or a hardware problem. Any ideas however far out would be appreciated.
For info, it is an Acer 7720G
Matt