A just curious computer wireless question...

[Lisa L from MI]

What is a good "speed" that should show on your laptop? I have an icon on the bottom that I check periodically. And just wondered, like, what is "top speed"??

Mine downstairs in the room next to the router says 54 Mbps and when I am upstairs it is usually 24.

It does fly compared to my desktop...but like I said in my title of the post, I am just "curious"

thanks
Lisa

**Edited to add: could someone add one of Mabels updated pics to my signature and put it next to her baby picture...I am not sure how to resize it and place it right...thanks...and just pm me if you could help and I will email the pic to you.....

 

[Dan Murphy]

Not sure about the first question, Lisa, but email the picture and I will resize it and send back. Link is lower left there. When I send it to you, stop by the Tech board, make a post and email me that you posted there, we'll get you set up.

 

[Lisa L from MI]

Thanks Dan...email on the way....

 

[Lisa L from MI]

Thanks Dan!!! It Worked!!

 

[Dan Murphy]

 

[Lisa L from MI]

Just a bump to maybe get an answer to my "curious" question about the wireless.....

 

[jfulcer]

Mine downstairs in the room next to the router says 54 Mbps and when I am upstairs it is usually 24.

Weeeellllll, it's really hard to say. There's about 600 different things that can effect your signal strength and the speed you get. These include:

How thick your walls and ceilings are.
If you house is a newer house or older.
If you have any other cordless devices in the house.
The direction your laptop is facing.
The type of card in your laptop and base station.
Actual distance between the laptop and base station.
Alignment of Mars and Venus.

So there's really no way to figure what your 'top' speed should be - unless you read the documentation that comes with your router and remember that is 'best case'. I have found that if your router has two antennaes, if you have one sticking straight up from the router and the other directly out to the side (not both straight up) you might get a better signal and speed.

Oh, and you should always always always make sure your connection is encrypted or you are most likely sharing it with your neighbors.

 

[Kermit]

I don't think that the speed or connection strength really matters much when you're just, for example, reading the DIS. It would have to be really slow before you started to notice a slow down. Even threads with several pictures on them wouldn't be too bad as long as you had a decent speed.

You will, however, need a good speed if you're sending or receiving files. I have a laptop, and when I'm emailing pictures of my boys to their grandparents, I carry the laptop into the room with the cable modem and router. If I were going to copy a large Oracle database from another computer in our house, I'd probably hard wire both of the computers to the router, rather than using wireless, if I could; otherwise, I'd make sure I had a good connection on both computers. Being close to the router doesn't just increase your connection strength, but it also makes it less likely that your connection will be completely severed for a few seconds, which could make you have to repeat the whole job you had been working on.