I have a sucky D-Link 802.11g card in my laptop that I’m just about sick of. It is giving me all sorts of problems, most pressing of which is that the range is terrible. I’m off to a conference soon, so I’m starting to worry I’ll have problems again. I did some reading on the web and found that a few companies have 100mW models, and a couple (including Taiwan’s Senao) have 125mW strength models. Does anyone here have experience with these models and care to share any insights, and does anyone know a good shop in Taipei for this sort of thing?
Thanks. I found that page already. The second link is for the 802.11b 200mW card, while I’m looking for 802.11g. The first page says that Senao’s 802.11g card is also 200mW, but everything else says that it is 125mW. The next best for 802.11g are apparently the 100mW cards from Cisco and SMC. There are even up to 300mW cards if you are happy with the slower 802.11b.
If you’re planning on using the WLan card in Europe, too, have a look at this article. I found it today while trying to get a friend’s brand new “centrino” laptop to connect to his DLan 624+ access point. Needless to say, his network was working on Channel 13 and therefore not visible to the stupid laptop. I eventually figured this out, but no happy end here, while the laptop can now connect to the network, it won’t accept a IP address assigned via DHCP and - even if a correct IP adress is manually assigned - anything more advanced than pinging the router won’t work. WLan sucks! In the end, I gave her a 20m ethernet cable.
Fortunately the Senao cards all seem to support 802.11d, so that shouldn’t be a problem with them. And actually, Japan is licensed for 14 channels, so they could have problems even with Euro cards.
In the end, I gave her a 20m ethernet cable.