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.
Does my computer have WiFi?
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.
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'
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.
Your mom is the most common.
it says 1394 Net Adapter and Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC under network adapters
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.
1394 is firewire. What Rubaaaaaaaaaah said.
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!!!!!!!
If your PC is stationary, you're better off with a wired network connection anyway. It's faster, and it's more reliable.
everything is wrapped in gray
i'm focusing on your image
can you hear me in the void?
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.
Don't get me wrong, I like it for my laptop.
everything is wrapped in gray
i'm focusing on your image
can you hear me in the void?
Don't get me wrong either. We only have 3 laptops and no desktops at all.
Mine is firmly wired, yet I have seen some fantastic speeds on my laptop over wireless.
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.
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.
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