Moona - neat trick, thanks for that!
Ancient Observer - thanks for that!
I'm a bit of a luddite as far as 'A' level IT is concerned, but, with a little encouragement from a mate, I took to updating the firmware and it paid off last time. The router was showing about 7mbps, the hard wired PC was showing about 5mbps but this trusty old Dell Inspiron Laptop showed a wireless 2.5mbps. With the latest firmware update, that shot up to almost the same as the PC ie 5-ish mbps. Now this could have been absolute coincidence, but nothing else had changed!! As long as you stich to the clear instructions on Netgear's website and make a backup before you start, I found it straightforward.
Cheers
mcdhu