Non car related I.T. Q.

[Father Ted]

Right, so a couple of years back we had babba number 3, and for a time the computer was moved from her room onto the landing, then into our bedroom. So to fellate interweb access I bought a 54mbs Belkin Wireess lan and pkugged one end into the cable modem and one end into the wireless box then had the pc wired up to this dongle thing, and it was utter shite, wouldnt stream video, took ages to download pictures, frequently "stalled" on loading pages. So went back to hardwiring PC back to modem and all was rosy, till wife got this old slaptop, so back on the Belkin we went. Now Im going to be moving the desktop PC to another part of the house about as far away from cable access as possible, so Im thinking of buying one of these N series wireless units capable of 100 odd mbs that say they can stream video and are uber quick - but will it work with my existing wi fi enabeled slap top or do I have to buy lots of dongles? Its all a mystery to me this 808.11b, g and so on. Or am I better getting some of those mains network adaptors? Or even getting the cable bloke to wire up the extension to Virgin ( but that means having shitty cable clipped to the door frames because they cant drill through walls or summat)? then at least the desktop PC can be wired up properly to the interweb rather than being retarded by the wi fi - i mean the only good bit is that I can surf the web whist on the park at the back of our house with our current set up (yes it is encrypted).So which way is best? Get the cable rerouted? One of those N type wifi or one of those mains networking things?

[r.welfare]

Not sure I can assist, other than to say if the Belkin jobby has the same standard - 802.11.b/g - as your laptop - it should be fine. I've got one of those Belkin things and we just turned on the laptop wireless, created a WEP key and away we went. Getting the desktop on it was a bit more involved, and required a PCI slot card of dubious parentage - but that works too.

[wuvvum]

I had much the same issues as you with wireless access when I moved into my current house. I went on various technical fora and the consensus was that everything I had was compatible and there was no reason why it wouldn't be working properly other than something in the fabric of the house that could be blocking the signal. In the end I went to Maplins and bought a f***-off great big long patch cable which I ran from the phone point in the hall, up the stairs and into the bedroom - it's been fine ever since.Ooh, I just saw a snowflake float past the window. Looks like the shite weather's here...

[MrRegieRitmo]

If you can find a way to get it hard wired - do it! It will be worth the hassle. I can't say anything to recommend wireless, it seems to be just about the nicety of not having cables draped about & nothing to do with practicality or usability! In our old house the wireless router was on the breakfast bar in the kitchen & the PC was on the floor in the hallway, there was literally one wall separating them, and it was useless! In the end I ran a network cable through the doorway which we had to unplug at night or leave the door open.In this house, the phone point was installed right by where we have the PC so no dramas with hard wiring. My sister's other half seemed to use the wireless ok from his laptop but you'd still get unexplained signal drops. Our new laptop could see the network but it wouldn't connect to it even when using the right WEP key. So in the end I thought sod this & set it up on the desk where our PC used to sit (that is broken & I haven't got around to fixing yet) & again just hard wired it in & can just use the web constantly!Even the wireless dongle that we got with the laptop won't connect so I haven't bothered with it since, even though it's what we're technically paying for each month, we just wanted it for the laptop, it was cheaper than getting one on finance. In fact PC World don't seem to offer anything on finance, just buy now pay in 12 months - no thanks! It's not like we'll ever really need to use it as not planning on taking the laptop 'out & about.'Even at work, we had one of our departments using wireless but we've now hard wired them in as it was too unreliable, we were forever getting calls that it had lost it's connection or just wouldn't connect!

[r.welfare]

Meh. Wireless reception can sometimes be a bit iffy @ the desktop - which lives 3 walls and 25ft away from the router. But I can live with it.Bigger problem is I can't seem to get the laptop and desktop on the same home network - be nice to get 'em to talk to each other as the desktop has the printers, scanner etc attached to them, but it's a dog slow machine these days and it's out in the garage...

[Father Ted]

Oh I so gave up trying to network the printer. What a waste of time. In the end I now dump stuff onto a dongle and then take it upstairs to the printer. Think im gong to give virgin a call and ask them to install a new cable. Will just direct them where to run the cable rather than have it nailed to the bloody architrave.