I installed a wireless network at home. Its grrrrrrrrrreat!!!!!!!

 

No more wires trailing around the house/up the stairs.

 

I went for a netgear solution from inmac but my mate sats that LinkSys are better. But the netgear solution was cheaper, not by much, and I am familier with their kit.

 

Zimon

 

p.s. I am sitting in the lounge watching the footy and I am on the forum as well. See blokes can do two thing at the same time!

Yeah blokes can do two things at once but birds cant......... my ex mrs had to stop walking to take a breath!

 

 

He He Ho Ho!

 

 

LUKE DUKESTER

 

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I have been using wireless at home and the office for about 18 months. Almost all the equipment is the same Lucent designed parts in a different box. For the Netgear vs Linksys point they are both OEM Lucent Orinico cards. I normally buy whatever card is cheapest. I do like the Linksys routers though.

What about interoperability? A friend told me the only way to be sure is to get kit from the same manufacuter - is this true?

 

Zimon

As long as you get kit that all same standard then you should be OK. So look for 802.11b or Wi-Fi. Now that covers the 'basic' connectivity, but I have discovered that if you use the encryption (and you should, but I have to say that - it's my job!) then some cards and drivers support 128bit, whilst others are only 40bit etc. Most of my kit is Buffalo which seems pretty god, but I have a Xircom card (read Cisco) and the encryption does not interoperate.

I have configured the netgear wireless router to only allow certain network cards, defined by their MAC address, to access the network.

 

I am not using encription due to the performance hit.

 

Zimon

It's not just the access to the network but the issue of the data being eavesdropped. It's really just a question of how sensitive your data is. If it's personal net surfing then it's probably not a big deal.