anyone know anything about wireless connections?

yes, I think

Yeah you probably had loads of your immediate neighbours connecting via your router and hogging all the bandwidth.

If your wireless network is not secured then anyonw who is in range of the signal can connect to it and use it to go on the internet. So it was most probably other people in your slowing your connection. Another reason can be the quality of your internet service provider but in your case it is most likely the first reason.

area*

would you have to conciously connect to a certain network, or would the laptop just "cop for a connection"?

thanks chaps. i'm with virgin, and aint had many problems before. just been the last week or so, and he "secured" it last night and it's been fine since.

You'd have to purposely pick it from a list. They probably wouldnt know who specifically the connection belonged to, just that it was one of their neighbours.

one last question;

what sort of range are we talking about here?

I would imagine that you had a WEP security set-up but were sharing channels with your neighbours. Your nephew probably changed your wireless channel resulting in a better connection. And set up WPA2 security.

probaly had people sitting outside your house in cars on their laptops

Was just in my mate's car before. Went down a few streets and used his iPhone 3GS to search for free wifi from people's homes. We found about one unencrypted network for every four encrypted, I'd say. He says in some areas no-one has them encrypted (low IQ,**my areas of town), and on my street (smart folk, obviously ;) ) everyone had their network encrypted.

The moral of that paragraph is that your likelihood in stealing a connection proportionately affects your chances having someone brick your windscreen. ;) :^0

Should always encrypt your network, for security purposes if nothing else. Don't want the coppers knocking on your door 'cos some wifi stealer carried out incriminating searches/downloads on your connection.