Hint.
Place the order on line for collection in the store and save at least some of the money that you wil be paying for a Sunday distress purchase.
Did you forget to place the order with Interflora? ;-)
Belkin is not a good manufacturer.
Of the consumer ranges, Linksys is the least bad.
USB adaptors are not a particularly good idea. They frequently have difficulties with software drivers.
Got that - "just say no to ADSL". I have no idea what ASDL means anyway :-)
You used to be able to get a good cat5 lead in PCworld for £1.99. You went to the component store and purchased a pci network card that had a cable in the box and chucked the card away.
Someone will be along to tell you it means asynchronous digital subscriber line in a moment. It wrong BTW it asymmetric as in the upload and download speeds are different.
I threw a Belkin USB adaptor away the other day. Couldn't get it to work in Windows XP or Vista Pro due to rubbish drivers (I have no reason to suspect the hardware). (Forgot that earlier.) Replaced with Edimax. Although a USB adaptor it works like a champion getting full 54 Mbps. My Edimax PCMCIA adaptor is as good.
More than likely the Belkin you specify will do. Or go to Maplins (open 1100-1700 Sunday) and get A92GA which is a Netgear WGR614 according to the faq for £44.99. Same sort of thing, just not so feature-full or long range. But you can always add wireless access points if need be later. Chatham store is alleged to have one in stock - phone first though.
Chances are that any decent (ie not cheapest) Cable (not ADSL) router will do the job. I guess you don't need the wireless bit either - unless people often bring round laptops (like my kids/friends do). Don't go for any special cables, the 'standard' unshielded twistedpair (UTP) ones will be fine. It's like 'audiophools' so you can spend lots on gold plated shielded stuff made from oxygen free copper that's been liquid nitrogen treated.
Imho names like Netgear, Linksys, Belkin are pretty big and should be OK. One disadvantage of PCW is the difficulty of returning anything if it's incompatible for any reason. Maplins can be a bit friendlier about replacements.
If the PC your wife has is new, and yours is running XP and is no more than a few years old, then you should be OK as regards drivers and software stuff.
If you are connected via USB, then just unplugging everything, turning it all of, count to ten, turn it all on, wait till everything has booted, then plug in the network (UTP, RJ45) cables one PC at a time - theoretically all works.... (!)
hth Neil
Well, obviously. :-(
OK, that is a RJ45 - so ethernet. There is USB socket as well, but you appear to not be using that.
Hope not! (Then again you can get ethernet network adaptors that connect via USB if needed)
Nope - that has a ADSL model already connected to the WAN side of its router - you need one without a modem and just another ethernet port in its place.
Well of course...
Brrrr... - sorry shivers!
Phone Louise at solwise, you will have it next day:
Have a look in your local media for computer fairs.
These are excellent sources for things like this at reasonable internet prices (many of the stands are internet retailers), and they will give you advice on the right product.
I always assumed they were an up-market relabeller of low-market products. Do they actually make anything, other than the packaging?
I don't think that they do.
Equally, I don't think that many of the consumer grade products are manufactured using the manufacturer's design.. Certainly when it comes to firmware it's pretty clear that they have little or no control over what's in there apart from perhaps some branding of the web UI. No support and typically 1-2 updates during the product's lifetime.
Of this group of products, I've tended to see best results with Linksys and Netgear.
When the hassle factor is considered, the entry level Cisco SB100 series at £120 inc. start to become interesting.
On another newsgroup a piece of software for cleaning up astronomical images was mentioned, iris.exe, it's supposed to be able to sharpen blurred and shaky pictures but I'm not clever enough to learn how to do it. If anyone has tried it (and found it works) then I'd be grateful for some step by step instructions.
AJH
Thats an out of date modem for VM these days....
In article , dennis@home scribeth thus
We buy perfectly good CAT 5 patch cables at around 50 to 60 pence around a metre long....
yesterday much better then distress purchases at PCW on a Sunday!.....
Concur on routers - my old router (which is kept purely as an emergency spare) undoubtedly needed a firmware update that Belkin never saw fit to obtain/release. Oddly, I did get helpful telephone support from them on an early gigabit switch.
My previous router had been an SMC Barricade - worked fine until it seemed to become a bit flaky after a few years.
Which is one reason we went for the Apple Airport Extreme Base Station with gigabit switch.
If you set it all up as it ought be and use CAT 5 networking theres no need to have any drivers of software on the client PC's at all!...
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