Wi-fi internet troubles

I'm having some wi-fi problems which I don't believe that are my fault (the landlord sucks and she knows jack shit. what's worse is that she tells me there's no number to call for help.).

A lot of times the internet is slow and pages often don't load at all and time out causing a very simple page to take a few minutes to actually load. Needless to say, this pretty much has killed any online gaming I like to do.

My question is, when I complained yesterday the landlord told me everything is fine as far as she knows (which it's not. My wi-fi at home worked perfectly fine before I came back to school). I'm using Net-gear to connect to the internet and I notice when I scan the available hotspots, I notice many from my apartment (ones with different channels and different mac addresses). However it won't let me connect to them even if I push "connect" on that one. It always connects me to the very first one (which isn't even the best signal) and I'm wondering if that's a software problem. Maybe it's just that specific channel/mac addresses that is pure shit.

Any ideas on how to connect to different channels? I tried using the windows software to connect but I didn't see any channels at all, just the main "X apartment" listed.

Thanks in advance!