The problem may be the macbook itself since you said it does the same thing both in windows and mac and the problem is not present with the other laptop.
This is a nice utility to run to see the strength of your signal also
http://www.passmark.com/products/wirelessmonitor.htmalso you can try a ping to the router see if the response time is more then 1 ms
or you could try to set up a local network share and move a big file between the systems see how that works,
I have a Linksys WRT54GC router and it moves files from one pc to the other at about 2,4MBytes/s.
It would be fair to say that if other systems perform normal and the macbook does not then there its safe to assume that the problem is with the macbook.
Regards