USB radio for older machine?

I recall using Orinoco adapter, both PCMCIA and also USB. They were only

802.11b 10Mb/s, but that should be fine just for Internet use. They are now available for pennies on Ebay etc. Eg:

|66%3A2|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1318|301%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A50 They only had WEP encryption and I believe the Silver version could only do

5 character WEP while Gold could do 13 characters, but there was also hacking software around to re-flash the Silver version into Gold.

Advice on installation:

Tony

Good luck.

Tony

How old is is this older machine?

If it is old enough to have only USB1.1, you are going to have to get a USB2.0 card in addition to the dongle. USB1.1 would be too much of a bottleneck.

Also, like Anthony alread said, getting Win98 to support WPA requires doing cartwheels.

Unless you are talking about laptop that you plan to mobile, I would suggest using a wireless-ethernet bridge versus using a wireless USB dongle. Since the bridge is external stand-alone hardware, it wouldn't require use of any this older computer's already limited resources. Bridges are also very handy to have since they are so convienent. They provide wireless connectivity for anything that uses ethernet, whether it be a computer or a device.

I bought a couple of these ($30 each) and they work very well. They support not only WPA, but WPA2 as well.

Oh, the product description on this device is "wireless LAN extender" simply because two modes it supports (in addition to "AP Mode" and "AP Client Mode") are "repeater" and "WDS".

"AP Client Mode" = "Wireless-Ethernet Bridge".

Thanks for your good answer.

"Anthony R. Gold" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Have you looked at any of the external USB dongles/devices? Don't have a win98se machine handy to try any, but i seem to recall a hawking tech external usb device that worked on my laptop in the rv with usb 1.1 and se (newer model they have online now requires newer stuff (xp/usb 2.0) but the older one must have worked, since i used it with my older laptop) had a separate prog that ran in memory, and did all sorts of encryption.....

In my experience, every USB WiFi adapter I've tried will work on older Win98SE machines, both with USB 2.0 and 1.1, provided that the package includes Win98 drivers. However, not all of them come with control programs that install and/or operate under Win98. One that does is advertised on

as "300mW USB Wireless Adapter w/RP-SMA (threaded) Antenna Jack & 5dBi Antenna." This has a RealTek RTL8187 chip, but no model number or brand name.

However, I prefer the 400mW adapter from the same source, which has a RealTek RTL8187B chip and also comes with external 5dBi antenna. It works not only on my older machines, but also on a newer, faster HP a656x computer with VIA chipset and AMD Athlon 3000+ processor, on which I had not been able to get any other USB WiFi adapter to work correctly in Win98SE. It came with working Win98 drivers, but the control program would not install in Win98. Fortunately, the control program from the

300mW RTL8187 also worked with the 400mWRTL8187B. The free Boingo control program can also be used with every adapter I've tried.