shared wireless network situation

I have an unfortunate situation, lol. I live in an apartment with two bedrooms on opposite sides of each other. Bedroom #1 is where RM lives, and the router is in that bedroom (unable to move it elsewhere because of the way it's wired). Whenever RM is home and online, my signal seriously goes down. Normally a file will download at 2 Mbps, but when sharing the connection I get stuck at 500 Kbps or less. I have a brand new wireless network card, and use the USB attachment so it reaches closer. But that doesn't seem to matter. Is there something that can be done about this? Are there any programs that can boost your signal, perhaps?

RM is probably playing an online game and/or running some torrents which uses up most of the available bandwidth. Not much you can do except talk to RM and try negotiating times when he/she will not do this. The alternative is to pay for your own internet connection.

i don't think it's a signal problem. think of your internet as a pipe with water(the data) flowing through it, now there is only so much water that can flow through it at once(this is called your bandwidth) so when the other person is out you get all the water/bandwidth(2 Mbps) but when they are in they are using some of the water/bandwidth that used to be all yours and why it now slows down to 500 Kbps. to be honest i don't think you can do anything to alter this process, except maybe pay for a better/faster(bigger pipe/more bandwidth) internet connection so you wouldn't notice the loss of bandwidth so much when they are downloading at the same time. ooops Ztruker beat me to a reply.