Wireless Preformance less on Linux than Win98

[Craig Bell]

I've got a dual booted Athlon 550, running Win98 and SuSE 8.1.  My eth0 
connection is a Netgear MA-311.  The wireless lan on both systems works fine, 
but Konquerer is much slower on the SuSE to load pages, etc, than IE on the 
windows side.

The Netgear Configuration GUI on Windows shows that my Link Quality is around 
90%, and the Signal Level a little less.  When I compare that to iwconfig 
under linux I get much less, about 64/92:

eth0      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"ourwirelesslan"  Nickname:"Prism  I"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462GHz  Access Point: 00:30:AB:17:54:E2
          Bit Rate:11Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   Sensitivity:1/3
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:64/92  Signal level:-51 dBm  Noise level:-149 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

I'm running the orinoco-0.13e driver on Linux, and the netgear supplied driver 
on windows.

I've spent the afternoon trying to find what I can on the web about tuning 
wireless performance, but aside from being in over my head on most of it, I 
haven't seen anything that directly compares how to get the link quality up 
or why it would be less on SuSE than on Windows in the same box in the same 
room.  I would sure appreciate some kind help to increase my throughput, or 
at least some easier to read doc on the subject of performance.

Is there any chance that I'm barking up the wrong tree, and that it's not in 
the wireless config at all?  Can the lower link quality from iwconfig be 
explained some other way?

Thanks!
Craig Bell