Quick question on USB Wireless Adapters

[Doggiedog]

for gaming? My main computer is hooked up through Ethernet but I'm planning on moving it so I'll need a wireless adapter. How is the performance of a USB adapter compared to a PCI adapter? Are they the same? I like the ease of installation of a USB adapter but would sacrifice that for performance when playing games like BF2 over the Internet.

 

[spikespiegal]

For lack of a better term, it sucks. The drivers that come with these things can often be more of a resource hog and harder to remove than a Root Kit. As a rule, I won't trouble-shoot a machine running USB ethernet. I'd rather set up a token ring network instead.

I've joked that USB ethernet was a hack invented by ISPs because they didn't know how to configure a basic Windows network card, nor wanted to deal with them.

Problem is I'm not a bit fan of PCI wireless cards either. Most are just a poor PCMCIA wi-fi card strapped to a PCI interface with an antenna on the back. Still, they are better than USB Wi-Fi, or until Intel gets its new chipset on the market which is supposed to fix some of the problems with USB ethernet...I believe.

If you have a Linksys Wi-Fi router and want the best performance, then there's a better way to do this. Get a LinkSys access point of the same class as your router, plug it into your ethernet port, and put the sucker in bridge mode. It will be secure, and have better data transmission than a PCI Wi-Fi card. Usually MUCH better.

 

[Doggiedog]

Originally posted by: spikespiegal
For lack of a better term, it sucks. The drivers that come with these things can often be more of a resource hog and harder to remove than a Root Kit. As a rule, I won't trouble-shoot a machine running USB ethernet. I'd rather set up a token ring network instead.

I've joked that USB ethernet was a hack invented by ISPs because they didn't know how to configure a basic Windows network card, nor wanted to deal with them.

Problem is I'm not a bit fan of PCI wireless cards either. Most are just a poor PCMCIA wi-fi card strapped to a PCI interface with an antenna on the back. Still, they are better than USB Wi-Fi, or until Intel gets its new chipset on the market which is supposed to fix some of the problems with USB ethernet...I believe.

If you have a Linksys Wi-Fi router and want the best performance, then there's a better way to do this. Get a LinkSys access point of the same class as your router, plug it into your ethernet port, and put the sucker in bridge mode. It will be secure, and have better data transmission than a PCI Wi-Fi card. Usually MUCH better.

That sounds interesting. I'm buying all new Linksys products now trying to decide what I need. I don't need anything like pre-N or MIMO. I'm only looking at Linksys since I've had bad experiences with D-Link and Netgear. Could you suggest to me what I should buy for this setup?

Thanks again.