(I bought a NetGear ProSafe FWP114G model and am very happy with it.)

~ GaySatyr (ABB)

Edited by - GaySatyr on 10/29/2004 4:23:57 AM

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The customer had his laptop in the front room and the router was in the back of the house (3 or 4 rooms away) and was getting a very weak signal, which was giving him internet access that would be on for anout 5 or 10 minutes and then drop out. It was odd, his signal would go from Excllent to very weak for no reason....

Now the iMac I hooked up to the hard port on the router worked fine

Edited by - PL on 10/29/2004 8:50:24 AM

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Like right now I have a netgear 802.11b router, I haven't had any problems with it. The signal is just fine throughout the house. I have been usin a Cisco aironet 350 card and have found this to be great overall. I have been picking up other peoples signals quite easily too.

Of course it does seem that everyone has an unsecured linksys..

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I'd love to go wireless if it was guaranteed. But I found it to be way too sensitive to signal interference and have abandoned it until I move out of my apartment condo. Turn on the Microwave, lose the connection. Use the 2.4 GHz cordless phone, lose the connection. Fart, lose the connection. No fun, you'd have to force it to reconnect too and don't get me started on WPA under those connections.

If you want to see bitching and complaining check out the microsoft.public.broadbandnet.hardware newsgroup

PC World has a feature article about going wireless in it's current (November) issue.

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I don't like the Linksys software that they seem to foist on you -- atleast on my Win2K laptop they do. XP seems to handle its own wireless connections OK.

I had nothing but heartache with a Microsoft USB wireless nic.

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I had a Belkin wireless router (11 mbs) and it wasn't bad for the price. It was about $30 after rebate at CompUSA last year. It worked fine except for one quirk -- it would drop the connection after a certain amount of time (like 120 minutes) even though it was configured to stay online forever. I discovered if I kept an instant message client open and logged in, it worked fine.

-- Snowman

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for cards, if you go with d-link, get an atheros card from them or netgear-otherwise proxim and cisco are the only ones that aren't awful. the client side matters more than you think---if you don't mind a cord the absolute best thing you can do is buy a quality wireless bridge, hook it up to your ethernet port and you're ready to surf. a bridge is going to offer you flexibility for future changes to your network and you can position it and add decent antennas. you're going to want to take the antennas off whatever you get-in theory a 25-dollar 6db directional antenna on your card/bridge and on your router doubles your range versus the stock omni 2db ones. that's a big deal and a fraction of the cost of more aps or repeaters. the directional antennas need to be pointed at each other's general direction, which also means you're not sending the signal to your neighbor's, which is considerate especially with the d-link.

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