wifi laptop or adapter
 

This might sound like a silly question, but i don't know the answer.

Do i need to buy a wireless laptop card to run at high speeds wireless or will the wi-fi in my laptop be good enough to cope ?

Re: wifi laptop or adapter
 

Depends what router you have. If you have an 11g 54Mb/s model then your laptop will handle it if it's reasonably new.

If your router uses one of the technologies that gives 108Mb/s then you'll need a compatible card to get full speed communication...

Re: wifi laptop or adapter
 

Exactly so if you have something like 802.11n (preN) then your laptop will connect but only at 54Mbit/s (802.11G)

However if you put an 802.11n card in it would connect at the full speed providing the signal is strong enough.

Re: wifi laptop or adapter
 

My laptop is a WiFi enabled Dell Inspiron 1501 - AMD Turion 64 X2 mobile laptop. I'm just bidding on routers on ebay at the moment.

Re: wifi laptop or adapter
 

That has 802.11g 54Mbps wireless built in, so if you get a basic 11g router you won't need an additional card. If you get one of the flavours of 108Mbps routers then you'll need a compatible PCMCIA card...

Re: wifi laptop or adapter
 

Or not, but it just won't run at top speed :)

Re: wifi laptop or adapter
 

;)

Re: wifi laptop or adapter
 

It depends what you call High Speed Cobby, I find that 108MBit wireless rarely runs at full speed unless you are sat next to the router :)

Re: wifi laptop or adapter
 

I find that 54g is usually fast enough for the internet anyway ;)

Not sure how it handles 20mbit + connections tho. :erm:

Re: wifi laptop or adapter
 

Thanks, i think that answers my question.
:)
If i buy a 54Mbps router, then my wifi laptop will be fine by its self, but f i buy a faster router (108Mbps) i would also need a card to fit in the side of my laptop.

Re: wifi laptop or adapter
 

Not quite

If you buy a faster router you'd need a card if you wanted it to connect at 108Mbps however if you were happy with connecting to the router @54Mbps the builtin wireless should still work fine.

Re: wifi laptop or adapter
 

After reading all this yesterday afternoon, i went out and bought a Netgear WGR614. It should be good enough to surf the net on my 4meg cable broadband.
;)
Thanks for all you help.

Re: wifi laptop or adapter
 

Don't forget to enable the wireless security features, preferably wpa-psk or wpa2-psk

stop other people "borrowing" your connection. ;)

If you want a really secure wireless code try

http://www.kurtm.net/wpa-pskgen/

then save it into a text file or something because the chances of being able to remember it are pretty slim :Yikes: