Posted: 3/15/2011 11:10:45 AM EDT
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I want to move a desktop computer to a room where I can't connect it to my router via cable, but still want to have LAN/WAN access.
Obviously I will need something more than the computer's built-in wired NIC. What's the best NIC to buy? Cheapest that's still good? Internal card, or USB adapter? PCI, or PCI Express? My router is a Netgear WNR3500v2, which does draft-N wireless. Naturally I would want a NIC that could take full advantage of that. |
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i'm assuming your situation is the same as everyone joe and jane blow on the planet.. (esp. the joe blows in Africa)..... Get an internal card, usb will likely give you more headaches. (i actually can't confirm that, as I never bothered with usb wireless) Pci or pci express won't matter. I doubt you'll actually need the N capability, G will work fine, and you will pay more for N. plus N is no longer in draft. |
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In the meantime, I was given a pair of wireless NIC cards, both D-Link, a WDA-2320 and a DWL-AG530.
They are both PCI. Joke's on me, because I forgot that my motherboard has only one PCI slot, already occupied by a sound card. So I cannot do any testing with the cards on my main machine. Fortunately, the target machine has 2 empty PCI slots. It is true that even 802.11n wireless, running at its theoretical max speed, will not saturate a PCI slot. However, a lot of newer motherboards have a PCI Express 1x connector that would otherwise go unused. Such as my main desktop. |
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The good news is that the older card, a D-Link DWL-AG530, DOES work in Windows 7, despite Microsoft calling it "incompatible." Once I figured out which PCI slot to stick it in (more on that below), Windows automagically loaded a MS driver for it, and I was able to connect to the house LAN in a jiffy.
All this, while Microsoft says the DWL-AG530 is "incompatible" with Windows 7. "Incompatible" is merely MS-speak for "we can't be bothered to test it ourselves, and the manufacturer can't be bothered to write a Windows 7 driver." Which isn't the same at all as "won't work." The bad news is that I'm having some kind of weird PCI device conflict. I can't get both the PCI sound card (a Rocketfish RS-51SDCD, really just a rebadged Audigy Value) and the PCI wireless card (DWL-AG530) to work at the same time. There are three PCI slots on the motherboard (Asrock K10N78D), but it seems as if only one actually works. Much later... I finally found the secret combination of PCI slots such that both devices would work together. Don't know why that was such a PITA. |
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Quoted:
The good news is that the older card, a D-Link DWL-AG530, DOES work in Windows 7, despite Microsoft calling it "incompatible." Once I figured out which PCI slot to stick it in (more on that below), Windows automagically loaded a MS driver for it, and I was able to connect to the house LAN in a jiffy. All this, while Microsoft says the DWL-AG530 is "incompatible" with Windows 7. "Incompatible" is merely MS-speak for "we can't be bothered to test it ourselves, and the manufacturer can't be bothered to write a Windows 7 driver." Which isn't the same at all as "won't work." The bad news is that I'm having some kind of weird PCI device conflict. I can't get both the PCI sound card (a Rocketfish RS-51SDCD, really just a rebadged Audigy Value) and the PCI wireless card (DWL-AG530) to work at the same time. There are three PCI slots on the motherboard (Asrock K10N78D), but it seems as if only one actually works. Much later... I finally found the secret combination of PCI slots such that both devices would work together. Don't know why that was such a PITA. This is likely your motherboards fault. Standard PCI (not express) has four interrupts; A, B, C, and D. All four interrupts are wired to all slots, but they rotate position on the connector. If you imagine a row of pins that correspond to these interrupts, all cards are setup with the interrupts on four pins in a row: ABCD. The slots are setup more or less like this: ABCD (slot 1) BCDA (slot 2) CDAB (slot 3) DABC (slot 4) So if you plug a PCI card using just INTA into slot 1, it'll actually use INTA; plug it into slot 2, and it'll use INTB. The whole point of this was to avoid all the pre-PCI (ISA, EISA) manual interrupt assigning you had to do to cards before you installed them, to avoid conflicts. Now, motherboards often have onboard components that are on the PCI bus as well, like any onboard NIC, sound card, and so on. Cheap motherboards will just wire them up as above, as "invisible" slots on the same bus. Better motherboards have a PCI - PCI bridge not just between the onboard and expansion bus, but between several expansion busses if they have more than 4 PCI slots. When the cheap ones do it without a bridge, you end up with the situation that you have; cards conflicting between slots, or individual slots that don't play nice with onboard devices. Couple this with a shoddy interrupt sharing driver for the chipset and you have a recipe for disaster, or at least for conflicts and lots of fucking around. Geek mode off. 
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Asrock is Asus' "cheap" line of motherboards, so none of that is surprising.
I would rather set a damned jumper than endlessly swap around cards. Can we get rid of PCI already? Or does PCIe 1x have the same "hey, we'll be clever and save money by eliminating jumpers, but waste your valuable time fucking around swapping cards instead" problem? |
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Quoted: Can we get rid of PCI already? Or does PCIe 1x have the same "hey, we'll be clever and save money by eliminating jumpers, but waste your valuable time fucking around swapping cards instead" problem? PCI is I think it pretty damn good, but it is the backwards compatibility with the ISA bus still found on all IBM compatibles. It is there for DOS, and because it was there, windows 95/98 used it. So did Windows NT. Now we're on Windows 7, of which the 64bit version has NO 16 bit support at all, yet it still has ISA bus drivers, so why the fuck are these (http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/industry/lpc.htm) still being bothered with? BTW, if memory serves, the PCI bus has two operating mode. 1) Slaved to an ISA bus (and more backwards compatibility shit to deal with) 2) Not slaved to an ISA bus, IE stand alone. No one ever used this mode in the PC world as DOS wouldn't work. [marcellus walles]Fuck DOS![/marcellus walles]  |
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Don't I know it. The Windows world is bursting at the seams with ugly hacks left over from years and years of legacy support.
It does seem a bit odd that I can no longer run some of the 16-bit apps which Windows XP handled with aplomb - even with Windows XP "compatibility settings." But I guess that's what virtual machines are for. My machine might be an exception to the PCI-to-ISA thing. I don't see a PCI-to-ISA bridge anywhere in Device Manager, just two PCI-to-PCI bridge doohickeys. It boggles the mind that anyone would think about MS-DOS support today. MS-DOS won't even boot on my machine, as it doesn't know what to do with RAM above 64 MB. 64 MB is a few tabs open in Firefox. |
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Quoted:
Asrock is Asus' "cheap" line of motherboards, so none of that is surprising. I would rather set a damned jumper than endlessly swap around cards. Can we get rid of PCI already? Or does PCIe 1x have the same "hey, we'll be clever and save money by eliminating jumpers, but waste your valuable time fucking around swapping cards instead" problem? I miss setting the jumpers too, in personal computing land anyway; in corporate IT it was a pain in the neck to keep track of all that for all the machines. EISA was even worse, needing all kinds of boot floppies and so forth to get things configured. PCI Express has none of the interrupt shenanigans of the previous designs; it's a point to point protocol, none of the data or address wires are shared between slots. The PCI - ISA bridge is actually the reverse of what Nimmer was getting at; that bridge means the ISA bus is itself connected to the processor via the PCI bus. The ISA bus is "hanging off" the PCI bus, not the other way around. PCI was never "slaved" to ISA. Back In The Day (tm), many onboard devices were ISA devices, the same way most are now PCI devices. The PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, COM/LPT ports, RTC, pre-ATA IDE (and EIDE) controllers, etc were all ISA devices predating PCI. Since this "just worked" it was common to leave these as ISA devices and simply hang a bridge off the PCI bus to provide access to them. My board which is only about 1yr old (Asus M4A785TD-V EVO AM3) still has that bridge as well, and there are several onboard legacy devices hanging off it. including some devices that will likely remain forever, and for ever be ISA devices, such as the "beep speaker" / system speaker. |
I tried to use a older usb antenna that kicks ass on xp and nix but 7 has no drivers won't find drivers and bladed @ 45° to the install disc. It is old (04 win2000) but should still work.
Just to help anyone from wasting time. Mine is a compex that looks like this but is grey. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833130111 I like wires. |
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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002WCEWU8 I got this to extend the reception on my Toshiba A665 laptop. It is running Win7 and working great. |
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You can also run ethernet through your house electrical wiring with the proper gear.
NETGEAR Powerline AV 200 Adapter Kit |