Been a while since I wrote anything, as I’ve been struggling with, then putting off my upgrade to Windows Vista. You can find my travails here, here and here (so far) at RTN. Mostly it’s been about drivers, though I haven’t exactly been eager to start as I have to reinstall EVERYTHING.
However, all the attention has been on my Dell wireless draft-N (meaning 802.11n) card. Even though wireless-N has not been certified, I decided to upgrade my wife’s laptop with a draft-N PC card and my router to a Netgear wireless-N router, the WNR854T.
This router had some good reviews, though range is still an issue. The main thing for me was compatibility, not just with older G cards I have, but also, and especially with the draft-N cards. Since I had decided on the Netgear WNR854T, I opted for a Netgear WN511T wireless card for my wife’s laptop (I had already heard the Dell draft-N card worked well with the WNR854T).
Basically, to set up a wireless network, you have to set up the SSID, wi-fi security, DHCP, and whatever it needs in order to login to your broadband service (in this case, Comcast … all I need is to have the router clone the Mac address of the PC the cable modem originally (and don’t forget to change the default admin password, of course).
All of this only took 15 minutes.
What took longer was setting up my wife’s wireless-N PC Card. I prefer to use Windows to manage the wifi settings for a driver, but in this case, even when I installed the Netgear drivers, the only way I could get anything BUT WEP as encryption was to use the Netgear utility. Oh, well.
Once I did this, I ran into the range issues. Or maybe it’s the fact that my wife’s laptop is in the living room, basically buried in a corner. I had to move the router closer to my office door, and then I got a much better signal. It still only showed in the middle of the “signal graph” in the Netgear utility, but she was getting 263Mbps.
On the other hand, when I hooked up my Dell Inspiron XPS M1710 laptop, it was only getting 130Mbps, despite having a better signal. Still, much better than 56Mbps.
Anyway, it took about 45 minutes, and I was done, up and running, and all networked peripherals were working fine. Whew. On to Vista?
April 12, 2007 at 8:02 pm
I have experienced similar limitations on vista with my DLink 802.11n card.
I purchased a new ThinkPad to replace an older latop. The new laptop has Vista and my old one XP Pro.
On XP Pro I easily connected at 300MBPS with Wireless n
On Visita I can only connect at 130MBPS using the same card.
I did the usual by checking drivers, etc. But even D-Link calls their Vista Drivers “Beta”. My guess is that the draft version worked fine with XP and there are some technical issues with Vista which I am hoping will be fixed through the certification of the standard.