Re: going mobile

[Robert <http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert>]

--- Gail Prime One <http://www.sbcglobal.net/~prime_one> wrote:
> I'm afraid I don't even know where to start. Do I need to get a separate
> piece of equipment for my laptop?

Yes.  You need a wireless PC Card.  You can get them anywhere.  There are two
flavors these days: 802.11b and 802.11g.  802.11b ('b') is slower and 802.11g
('g') is faster.  Of course, 'g' is more expensive than 'b'.  What you get
likely depends upon the Wireless Access Point (WAP) that you buy.

I have 802.11b since it was the only thing available when I bought my
equipment.  It's 11 MegaBitsPerSecond (11 Mbps) which is fine 'cause my LAN
runs at 10 Mbps anyway.  Unless you're planning to download movies over the
internet in the near future, 'b' will be probably be good enough.

I used to have Linksys everything: a Linksys router and a Linksys Wireless PC
Card.  But the PC Card was sh*t and eventually just died.  (I bought a Orinoco
Gold wireless PC Card which works well so far.)  I still have a Linksys
wireless router which is both a router and a Wireless Access Point (WAP).  [In
fact, I have *2* Linksys routers -- one wireless, the other wired.]

> Install something?

Yes.  PC Card.  If you're willing to wait, try http://pricewatch.com for the
cheapest price.  Otherwise, any computer store will carry them.  (BTW, I
dis-recommend the old Linksys PC Cards because they were terrible at going
through walls.  My Orinoco card worked well.)

> Is the connection to
> the internet slow?

I never had any problems with it.  If I ever start doing speech recognition
development work again, it will become painful because speech data files are
usually quite large.  But, I suspect this won't be an issue for you.

I do recommend that you turn Wired-Equivalent Privacy (WEP) which encrypts the
wireless channel.  Otherwise, people may try breaking into your computer and
also use your internet connection (which could slow you down).