wireless adapter question
I was just curious as to the differences between various types of wireless adapters including the adapter cards (suckers you slide into your pci slot), usbs, and the little boxes that attach via usb with the antennas on the side.
I'm currently relocating and will be moving into a house with strangers. I do not know their router type although I would assume at least a 802.11g network.
I'm thinking that for the boxes and cards (some I saw had an antenna attached to an extension .. couple feet long) would be able to give you some more reach if you're in a high interference area although I don't think (at least hope) that this wouldn't be a problem. I believe they mostly run on 2.4ghz freq( 'a' is 5 I think) .. which if i recall correctly, a bunch of wireless phones do too. If that isn't the problem then is there a drastic difference between the three types? perhaps heating issues for the usb adapters? I plan on leaving the computer online with a powerdown perhaps once a week.
Most were typically usb 2.0 so that wasn't the problem
I saw that 55Mbps was pretty much average.. about 7megs/s right?
-I predominantly torrent stuff 24/7 and play some warcraftIII everynow and then. would this be sufficient? From glancing at craigslist I saw that many of the apts came with cox cable. I don't know if that's any indication of the bandwidth type/quality. Again, of course it would also depend on the router too.
I also saw 128/64bit wep wpa encryption.
-from my understanding wep is preferred over wpa. Is this encryption necessary? I plan on doing some banking stuff on the computer so would whoever is at the host computer the router is connected to would he be able to snoop? Naturally I'd have at least zone alarm running or something.
thanks for the help. I didn't think that pc specs were necessary but definately hit me if it is.
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