I have an old wired router. I am thinking about changing to a wireless router. I am also looking into buying wireless USB adapters to save the time and hassles of having to open up the computer cases and install new wireless cards. I don't know anyone that is using these USB adapters. Do these work as well as the regular wireless adapters? Are there problems that I should know about? If I do use USB adapters do I still have to open up the computer cases to remove the old network cards?
I use a USB adapter and a PCI card in various machines.
The USB adapter has the advantage that it can be put on the end of a USB cable and sited to get best reception - without incurring siginal loss.
The PCI card is OK except that it means the antenna is poorly located at the back of the PC case. You can however replace the antenna with a higher gain unit on a pigtail (cable) but you will lose strength from the cable length.
You do not have to remove the network cards. Simply disable the card in the PC system hardware device manager settings.
I regularly do this when I use a USB device on a cable with a laptop with a built in antenna/card.
I would go for the USB device as it gives more flexibility.
Both perform about the same - PCI maybe slightly better.
I think he wants to ask if a wired connection is faster than a wireless one. Gigabit gigabit gigabit you can't pull enough cable (By the jeez, Warren, when are you gonna get that crap hidden in the walls like you promised? Patience, cherub.)
A PCI card does have the potential to be faster at passing a lot of data. Certainly faster than, say, a USB 1.1 connection. A USB 2.0 connection (and drivers that properly use it) would probably be fast enough to keep up with the connection to the Internet in most situations. If you have a lot of PC-to-PC traffic it might be faster to use PCI cards. Certainly faster if you have gigabit cards and switches (and cable that will carry it).
But why switch to wireless when you already have wires? Wires don't (generally) suffer interference. Most routers also have a couple of wired ports (typically 4). So keep the current wired stuff as-is and use wireless for new stuff.
~ >>Thanks for the reply. I have heard that PCI is slightly faster with the ~ >>internet than wireless. Is this true and if so is it significantly faster? ~ >
~ > You wouldn't be able to notice any difference. ~ ~ Without knowing what sort of internet connection he has how can you make ~ that claim? Just pulling it out of your ass again.
John seems to have been making a subtle point that may have eluded even a sophisticate like you.
I.e. that, with extant "wireless" (assuming here 802.11 techology), per-client throughput above 300Mbps half duplex has not been demonstrated. Since the capacity of both PCI and USB 2.0 is significantly above that, it would seem that the bus choice is not a bottleneck.
Since you didn't mention special requirements such as a big internet pipe (T3+) or wanting to be able to toss massive amounts of data around your LAN (such as HD video), it is safe to assume that your requirements are the same as 95% of everyone else. In this case, yes, a USB adapter(s) will work fine. I noted that you wrote "computers" (plural). More on that later...
Think of wireless as a supplement to an existing wired network. Wireless is great for mobile devices such as laptops and computers where it would be a pain to run cable to, but "if you can run wire easily, run wire". Using wireless just for the sake of using wireless is a waste of money and performance.
Nope. Keep the ethernet NIC cards in place. They will co-exist peacefully with wireless hardware. They may even come in handy again.
Back to "computers": Are these computers in the same physically location, or in locations where running wire between them is practical? If so, you can use one piece of wireless hardware (such as USB device) to give connectivity for all of them. If you get a wireless router, use your old wired router as a hub for all of them. On the computer with the wireless hardware, run wire from the ethernet port to one of the LAN ports on the wired router. Then, simply, connect the rest of the computers ethernet ports to the other LAN ports on the wired router. Don't use the WAN port on the wired router. Make sure DHCP is turned off on the wired router, since DHCP will now be coming from the wireless router. Finally, bridge the wireless hardware and the ethernet NIC together on the computer with both. In Windoze, this is done simply by holding control down + left clicking both icons, then right click, then select "bridge". Everything will now talk.
It's probably worth mentioning that the bridge computer will need to remain on, right? I've never done this kind of bridge but I assume that would be the case.
Yes, that would be true. If there were multiple computers near each other, a better solution might be a Netgear wireless print server, which also allows four computers to be connected through it to a WiFi network. $74.99 on Amazon.
formatting link
I have never tried one, but I expect to buy one as soon as I get my new/old iMac working, since it has an ethernet connection, and i want it to be wireless.
On Sat, 22 Nov 2008 11:48:39 -0500, "Bill Kearney" wrote in :
All the ad hominem does is make you look childish and petty.
In fact there is no noticeable difference between the speed of USB and PCI Wi-Fi adapters, as you would know if you'd measured as many as I have. That's not terribly surprising, since the speed of both is much faster than the Wi-Fi network. To be clear, I'm assuming USB High Speed (400 Mbps), which should be true of anything the OP would buy these days, although even USB Full Speed (12 Mbps) is fast enough for most broadband.
On Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:18:15 -0500, "Bill Kearney" wrote in :
Nope. PCI Wi-Fi is no faster than USB Wi-Fi even for PC-to-PC traffic. That's because USB High Speed is sufficiently faster than any Wi-Fi link.
The only caveat might be sharing a USB controller between maximum speed Wi-Fi and a very fast peripheral at the same time, but even that is unlikely to be an issue, in part because most computers use different USB controllers for different USB ports. Just don't use a hub to share a single USB port between Wi-Fi and (say) a high-performance disk drive.
BTW, your use of USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 is incorrect. USB 1.1 includes two possible speeds; USB 2.0 includes three possible speeds; and there are USB 2.0 products that do not support High Speed. To be correct you must specify the speed, not the version of USB.
On Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:26:57 +0000 (UTC), snipped-for-privacy@78.usenet.us.com wrote in :
Or other wireless client bridge. Good advice. In addition to the bridge computer having to be left on, all the traffic running through the bridge computer can have a performance impact, both on the bridge computer and on the client computers.
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