Drain Bead just got her ready-for-law-school Laptop computer today. It took about 43 minutes before we were fighting for who would be online…
I’ve heard about Wireless Networking. Her computer came with a brochure for a system called the Symphony-HRF USB Adapter. This looks perfect since we wouldn’t have to worry about having our computers directly hooked up to each other and we could both be online at the same time.
We use a dial-up. We might get a cable modem if we know we’re staying here, so ideally whatever we do would be adaptable for that.
So is Wireless Networking an option for us? Anyone have any experience with it? What kinds of hardware choices are there and how costly is it? And does it matter if the host PC has a different OS (but still Windows) than the Laptop?
What other options are there to get the desired effect: Both computers online at once without an extra phone line?
This is attached to my router which is attached the cable modem. You could I think just attach the base station thing (access point) to the cable modem but you have to check that because I am not sure.
It says it goes a 2 mega bits but I have not seen it do that well.
Linksys make good stuff. I have not used the wireless stuff they have but I am very happy with the firewall router.
BEFW11S4 looks like you can connect it to your cable modem. The linksys stuff is what I would get if I was buying now because it is much faster. they say 11 Mega bits per second.
The 802.11b (wireless protcol) security is not very good. If that is a big concern to you might not want wireless connection.
Taking the laptop and using it in the living room is the best. The wife loves it.
I think the base station is about $250 and the pc cards are about $200. Computers 4 sure is a great place to buy this kind of stuff.
You are now speaking with the tech support for that Symphony adapter, dude. Just think of the cards like regular old wired NIC’s, but with a feature that allows you to run a siganal test. They also have built-in analog modem sharing software, and a proxy (that doesn’t work too well). IF you’re running WinME, you’ll need version 2.1 of the software available at the homepage (www.proxim.com, click on support, click on download software)