Internet connection seems slower since I went wireless

i doubt seriously you need 1 gigabit speed to surf or download, your harddisk would be full in a very small time

600 mbytes in 1 min
36 gig in 1 hour
360 giga bytes in 10 hours, diskfull (or near)

also it's not about the speed YOU connect, it's about the bandwidth the site will give you

so when you start calculating your download speed, you will notice you never really downloaded at 1 gigabit speed

right... I know that I'll probobly never come closs to hitting that gig mark... but ever since I've connected this it just seems like everything has slowed.  Even browsing websites seems slower (I know that between the 2 speeds I shouldn't notice a difference).  but the biggest differences is when I'm downloading like 4-5 files and playing a game like battlefield 2.  I get more lag now then I used to and this is the only reason I can think that would cause the problem.  Also I have the games on one drive and the files are being downloaded to the second drive (not just partitions but different drive entirely) so I don't think it's just HD lag.  Before when I know I connected at 1gbps I never really felt any lag during gameplay.  So it's not so much the SPEED I'm looking for it's the amount of traffic I can have at any point in time.  

and no... I don't really NEED a 1 gig connection... but hey... it's the same price as a DSL so I figured "why not".

i am a gamer myself

Do you have a problem only when using wireless or since you got optic line?

because i would never play an action game on wireless, it add latency, period. (signal conversions add latency)

everyone cry about it, but gamers should know otherwise, you dont want to lose, you dont play with wireless lag :P

Well like I said my desktop runs to the wireless-n router regularly through a lan nic and cable... the only parts that are wireless are my laptop and a digital entertainment center thing.  So I guess to answer your question... no my desktop connects wired, HOWEVER< since the wireless-N router it seems I've had a difference.

ok I was just looking at some of my DL rates and the best speed I've gotten tonight was 8Kbps... the worst was 1Kbps... Most everything I've DLed was at 1 tho... but even at 8 isn't that a bit slow even for a DSL connection?

The WRT300N has wired connections at 10/100Mb, so it's not designed to run a 1Gb connection. 802.11n is faster, but still not 1 Gb, even before the latency issue (and delays for encryption). So you shouldn't be expecting the same speed through the router that you were getting when you were plugged directly into the fiber optic connection.

right but a 1kbps download seems exceptionally slow... I've been fiddling and trying to get my 1gbps back by plugging the modem directly into the computer and now I can't get that back... the cards say I have limited connectivity and connect at 100mbps... so now I don't know what has happened.

also, in your network card setting, is QOS on or off?
QOS manage the process priorities to your network card bandwidth
maybe it priorise your download and not the game

i usually put qos off, cause it's management is not so good

I agree that 1Kb is far slower than you should get with any broadband connection--even a dialup connection should be faster than that. Something is definitely wrong, whether with the router, with the site you're downloading from, your ISP, or your computer.

I think the first step is to try to get working with a direct connection to your fiber optic line. Presumably you've tried your trick of disabling and re-enabling the network card. You may also want to delete the network adapter from the Device Manager to force Windows to reinstall it.