airport card question

okay, so i have to apply to law school and LSAC will only let me do applications on a WINDOWS machine so i traded laptops with my girlfriend for the week. one very disturbing thing that i've learned is that websites on her laptop load BLAZINGLY fast, while my powerbook takes at least 3 times longer. i'm not exactly sure what affects the speed of loading webpages, but she has a 2ghz P4, 512MB, 32MB video card, running XP, and using Firefox. i have a 1.25ghz, 512MB, 64MB video card, running panther, and using Safari. she uses a 802.11g card, just like my airport extreme, but i think her D-Link has some speed accelerator or something. in which case i still don't think that would affect the download speed from the net. we also both use 802.11b wireless routers in our respective apartments. no matter which apartment we're in, hers is always faster when loading webpages. any answers?

have you tried any other browsers besides safari? camino, firefox, opera, omniweb? some say safari is quite slow.

Have you tried this: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040516220739506