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Performance/reliability of a USB ethernet or wireless ethernet adaptor ?

J

jtallon

Golden Member
Just wondering if anybody has any experiences, positive or negative, with the new USB ethernet, or USB wireless ethernet adaptors that are out there ? I've got a cable modem and an existing wireless network at home (802.11b), but just a cheap-ass Netgear FA-311 ethernet card in my primary system now. It flakes out all the time, doesn't handle suspend mode correctly, and doesn't have good XP drivers. So I'm going to replace it.

So, how useable is one of the new wireless ethernet adaptors, or even a wired one ? Can you get enough bandwidth through USB to handle things without creating a bottleneck ? Are they reliable enough to be a primary network connection for a computer that is on 24/7 ?

Thanks for the advice !
 


<< So, how useable is one of the new wireless ethernet adaptors, >>



Don't know about USB adapters, but I use wireless orinoco silver pcmcia cards and they're very reliable. On one desktop machine, I have it plugged into a pci adapter card. The only problem I've had is when someone accidentally pushes the channel button on our cordless phone to the same channel as the wireless router/orinoco silver.

The Pcmcia card and the pci adapter will probably set you back $100-125, which may be more than you wanted to spend.
 
I tried using a USB ethernet adapter, and with my cable modem and windows 98 it would lock my computer up anytime it started to download at high speeds (> 150 KBps)...i found that it was set to Turbo mode, so I changed it to normal and poof no more lockups...I wouldn't recommend the USB adapter though, its just nicer to have a true PCI or PCMCIA card to handle your networking (especially if you want to use 100BaseT, since I dont know if USB can handle that kind of bandwidth) If youre gonna replace your existing card, may i recommend the Linksys LNE100TX series of cards, windows XP comes with drivers for them, linux supports them, and they can be had for about $15, which is a great price for a great card.
 
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