Does my computer have WiFi?

[Carl the Llama]

well the name pretty much says everything, I will have a BT Home hub and phone on wednesday so I wanted to know if my computer is WiFi enabled... how do I find out? any help would be great thanks.

[rubah]

If it's a desktop, probably not.

If it's a laptop and bought within the last couple of years, probably yes. CHeck to see if there is a slot that looks sorta like a smaller version of a floppy drive (it'll be about two inches wide and have a button you can push to remove something) that's a wireless card port, so you'll have to buy one.

Otherwise, go to My Computer, right click and pick properties, go to the Hardware tab, choose Device Manager, and tell us what listed under 'Network Adapters'

[Yamaneko]

It's more than just a wireless card port. If it does have a slot on the side it's either a 54mm (CardBus or the older ExpressCard standard) or 34mm (the newer ExpressCard standard) opening used for a wide range peripherals. Wireless networking cards are just the most common.

[rubah]

Your mom is the most common.

[Carl the Llama]

it says 1394 Net Adapter and Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC under network adapters

[rubah]

1394 works on firewire and the other one seems to be ethernet, so my guess is you need to buy an external wireless receiver. If it's a desktop or doesn't have the wireless card slot, you can get a USB one.

[Discord]

1394 is firewire. What Rubaaaaaaaaaah said.:)

[Carl the Llama]

curse BT ; ; the usb recievers they sell are like £50... with sky they give you 4 recievers but with BT you get 1... CURSE BT!!!!!!!

[Mirage]

If your PC is stationary, you're better off with a wired network connection anyway. It's faster, and it's more reliable.

[Discord]

Mirage's right. WLAN is still so-so. It's much more reliable than what it used to be 5 years ago, but meh, you know what I mean.

Unless laying the cable would cause inconveniences, which it very often does. I remember what it was like before I switched to WLAN and I can only recommend the migration.

[Mirage]

Don't get me wrong, I like it for my laptop.

[Discord]

Don't get me wrong either. We only have 3 laptops and no desktops at all.:p

[rubah]

Mine is firmly wired, yet I have seen some fantastic speeds on my laptop over wireless.

[o_O]

Wireless works perfectly well for what it's designed for, and easily as well as a cabled connection.

One can argue that 802.11g is 54Mbps compared to an ethernet NIC's 100Mbps, but (and we're disregarding the fact that 802.11n is actually 108Mbps - faster than ethernet) when are you ever going to need a data rate of greater than 54Mbps? Most internet connections in the world are below 10Mbps and very few are above 20Mbps so I don't think it's fair to say that wireless is faster.

As for reliability, it's unreliable if you're using it beyond the range at which you're supposed to be or in poor circumstances. The range should be greater than what you'd realistically expect to be using an ethernet cable over as well, i.e. the convenient range of a reliable wireless connection is greater than that of a cable. The connection would be unreliable if you're using it in a location where there is interference over the frequency bands which the router uses. Both that and being too far away are user errors, not flaws in the wifi architecture.

The only reason to tell someone that ethernet is preferable to wireless would be for security reasons. That's about the only advantage it has. :p

[Discord]

Security? Meh, I've never tried doing it myself but cracking a 128bit algorithmic encryption with dynapic key swapping would seem rather hard to me.

[rubah]

it's unreliable if you're using it beyond the range at which you're supposed to be or in poor circumstances.

yeah ethernet gets pretty unreliable when you start getting about ten feet out ;DDDD

[Yamaneko]

I have fifty feet of CAT 5 cable going to one of my boxes and while it's not as reliable as my machine connected right next to my router, I've never had decreased speeds or large packet loss. I have, however, tried to play games online over wifi g and the choke I encountered was enough to steer me away from that until I get an 802.11n network going in the next couple months

[crono_logical]

The single BT hub is good enough for most homes if you put it in a sensible place :p

Even if the raw throughput of wireless might be higher than wired, it's shared bandwidth between all devices using the wireless (minimum of 2 - the computer and the receiver) so you won't get as high speeds as a proper full-duplex wired connection anyway. But yeah, unless you like to share or stream large amounts of data between different machines on your home network, like music or videos, wireless is fast enough for general web browsing and downloading :p

As far as range goes, I'm not sure I'm come across any wireless that operates decently at a 100m distance from the access point, which is the limit for a wired 100mbps connection. Most of our computers at work (and we have 5000 computers) have ethernet cable runs between 30 and 100m. If you're having problems with ethernet with longer cables, you've got a poor quality cable or cheap switch at the other end :p It's shorter if you want gigabit ethernet though :p

With security, if you're using WEP, you might as well have no encryption since you can download bootable linux images that will let you sniff and crack WEP-encrypted traffic within seconds - make sure you're using WPA with TKIP (dynamic keys). The BT hub is WEP by default for some moronic reason, so you'll have to change that yourself :p

[Discord]

How can you crack a 128bit code within seconds? I mean, have you ever actually done it or seen anybody do it?

Anyhow, WEP is a little older then WPA. Most 2-year-old cards don't even support WPA. I guess that's your reason.

[crono_logical]

I said WEP, not 128-bit encryption or WPA :p I think the default for WEP is only 40 bits too, which is hardly very strong these days. Even then, we wouldn't consider using 128-bit WEP at the workplace, because it's still a weak algorithm, and sniffing enough air traffic will provide you with enough data to crack it.

[o_O]

it's unreliable if you're using it beyond the range at which you're supposed to be or in poor circumstances.

yeah ethernet gets pretty unreliable when you start getting about ten feet out ;DDDD

I was talking about a reasonable home situation. Most people don't have fifty feet of CAT5 so generally speaking, I wouldn't expect to be using ethernet over a larger distance than wireless. In addition to that, fifty feet of cable is a lot less convenient than a wireless connection. :p

[Yamaneko]

Drilling a hole through my floor and passing the CAT5 into my parents room from under the house took about twenty minutes. Thankfully I haven't had to deal with rodents chewing through the cable in the three plus years I've had the setup. :p

[rubah]

the joke mike was that most people don't have very long ethernet cables! at least I don't :(

[Discord]

I said WEP, not 128-bit encryption or WPA :p I think the default for WEP is only 40 bits too, which is hardly very strong these days. Even then, we wouldn't consider using 128-bit WEP at the workplace, because it's still a weak algorithm, and sniffing enough air traffic will provide you with enough data to crack it.

Umm... I have a 128-bit WEP. I used to have a 64-bit one before. Certain of that.

Talking about workspace security. We're not even allowed to use IRDA keyboards.:p

[rubah]

I always thought wpa was the insecure technology.

[Rostum]

I thought it was more secure. *shrugs*

Well there are a few things that don't support WPA, like the Nintendo DS.

[o_O]

WPA is far more secure, Allie. :p

Nobody should use WEP.

WPA's not totally secure - it's still possible to crack a password with a pretty quick computer and cracking algorithm. The strength of WPA is that the passkey changes over time. WPA2 (uses an AES-based algorithm) is the only wireless encryption algorithm considered completely secure though.

[Discord]

WPA is quite a bit more secure and quite a bit less supported. Cracking a WEP is rather problematic too though. Bruteforce is all nice and fun, but considering the fact that most routers give good delays between inputs and ban your cards ID for a day after a serious number of tries, does make it rather useless. The other alternative, being the decryption of seperate transmitted packages, is also rather hopeless leading to naught due to inconsistancies during the transfer.

[Carl the Llama]

sucky bt didnt send me any wireless recievers dispite me specificly calling them up to ask if it included one with the bt home hub and phone... I am not amused

[Discord]

That's just why I love my ISP. When I said I needed a new router for their upgrade to work, they've sent me two.:rolleyes2

[rubah]

my isp gave me a crappy rebranded modem that *thinks* it's a router.

[o_O]

WPA is quite a bit more secure and quite a bit less supported. Cracking a WEP is rather problematic too though. Bruteforce is all nice and fun, but considering the fact that most routers give good delays between inputs and ban your cards ID for a day after a serious number of tries, does make it rather useless. The other alternative, being the decryption of seperate transmitted packages, is also rather hopeless leading to naught due to inconsistancies during the transfer.

It's true that WPA is less supported than WEP, but with the exception of devices like a PSP or DS, almost all wireless NICs support it out of the box and if they don't there's usually a firmware or software upgrade to enable WPA support. Even my phone supports WPA. The whole purpose of the design of WPA was to make a more secure encryption scheme without breaking compatibility with older hardware.
A 40 bit WEP key can be cracked in about a minute, and not much longer for longer keys. You don't need to use bruteforce because you can decrypt the IP datagrams to obtain the key. The only algorithm that actually implements any sort of "banning" is WPA because the developers knew it would have to comply with older hardware and couldn't be as strong as they needed it to be. Banning a particular client is almost useless anyway, since a MAC address is easily spoofable.

[Discord]

WPA is more secure, no questions there. I still doubt that one can take out a WEP code in a minute though. Plus, where did you get the number 40 from? They're all either 64 or 128 bit based.

[Yamaneko]

64 bit encrypted WEP uses a 40 bit key.

[crono_logical]

From a quick google search: (http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-crack-wirless-wep-104.html)

WEP is a protocol for securing wireless LAN. WEP therefore uses the RC4 stream to encrypt data which is transmitted over the air, using usually a single secret key (called the root key or WEP key) of a length of 40 or 104 bit.

We were able to extend Klein’s attack and optimize it for usage against WEP. Using our version, it is possible to recover a 104 bit WEP key with probability 50% using just 40,000 captured packets. For 60,000 available data packets, the success probability is about 80% and for 85,000 data packets about 95%. Using active techniques like deauth and ARP re-injection, 40,000 packets can be captured in less than one minute under good condition. The actual computation takes about 3 seconds and 3 MB main memory on a Pentium-M 1.7 GHz and can additionally be optimized for devices with slower CPUs. The same attack can be used for 40 bit keys too with an even higher success probability.Under 1 minute for 104-bit keys (or 128-bit encryption) sounds insecure to me :p If you want to get your hands on such software to prove it for yourself, just look around for the linux distro BackTrack, it's a bootable ISO image too so you don't need to install anything :p

[Discord]

Time to switch to WPA then...

Not that I have any shared folders or anything worth taking, other than my bandwidth anyway.:p

[crono_logical]

Bandwidth is usually what people who run botnets, spamnets or illegal xdcc/ftp servers want anyway, not your personal files :p That's the same attitude people who don't want to run virus scanners/firewalls take - they think no-one wants or is interested in their data so it's not worth the effort to protect, when in fact it's the computer resources that they're after :p

[Mirage]

256bit WPA please.

[Discord]

Bandwidth is usually what people who run botnets, spamnets or illegal xdcc/ftp servers want anyway, not your personal files :p That's the same attitude people who don't want to run virus scanners/firewalls take - they think no-one wants or is interested in their data so it's not worth the effort to protect, when in fact it's the computer resources that they're after :p

Well, it certainly does matter for somebody using a laptop with the latest feedback from the accountancy and project management departments. Most companies don't want that data out in public and, mind you, there are enough people who want it dearly.

This of course doesn't apply for the casual home PC.

[rubah]

My encryption is a dead end road with a 'no trespassing' sign and dead cow skulls hanging up, and neighbors who all have their own internet.