Well, my first foray into the world of networking has gone surprisingly well. Spured on by the fact that my new company “laptop(My company laptop – The Dell Latitude D600)”:http://catalog.us.dell.com/CS1/cs1page2.aspx?br=3&c=us&cs=04&fm=10435&kc=6W300&l=en&s=bsd comes complete with wireless networking capability, I thought it was time to clean up some of the mess of wires in my house, replace my IpCop box which was cluttering up the space under my desk, retire my slightly grubby stingray ADSL modem and buy some brand spanking new wireless kit.
After much research, I eventually plumped for a “Belkin ADSL Modem With Built-In 11g Wireless Router”:http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=201576&pcount=&Product_Id=158009&Section.Section_Path=%2FRoot%2FNetworking%2FWirelessNetworking%2F80211gWi%2E%2E%2Etworking%2F, and one of their 11g cards for my desktop machine, both purchased from “Dabs”:http://www.dabs.com/. Belkin claim the modem can be installed in 5 minutes, and I must say if anything it was quicker. The card took slightly longer to install, but that was due to the incredibly tight fit on the motherboard – but I’ve had trouble with that in the past and put it down to the motherboard rather than the PCI cards themselves. Anyway, after 10 minutes usage, I can highly recommend both the modem and the card. So, I now have a fully functional (WEP-secured) wireless network which will allow me to access the Internet from anywhere within my small, one bedroom flat. Still, it means I can blog on the toilet…
magpiebrain 
7 Responses to “Wired to Wireless in 5 minutes”
It’s probably more flexible than that. I bet you can take your laptop outside, down the corridor, into your neighbour’s flat, and blog from *his* toilet.
As much as I hate to sound like a teenaged American girl: Eeeeuuuuwwww!
Wow. Blogging from other people’s toilets? Now that’s what I’m talking about – the future has arrived!
Check out Slim Devices – a US company that does a fab wireless gadget for your hifi that connects to your wireless service, reads your itunes or other MP3 playlists and plays them through your hifi with remote control access to your complete MP3/AAC/WMA collection! PC under the stairs and music in the living room – pretty cool.
How many unprotected networks can you see from your apt Sam? Its terribvle over here, I can join three (all linksys as it happens)? Mines restricted to my machines’ MAC addresses but I see the others as handy ADSL backups if mine’s running a bit slow 😀 I’m thinking of cancelling my own line and just using other’s bandwidth hehehehe
Can’t see too many wireless networks around here, although I suspect they are rather thin on the ground in Dalston 🙂 My network is protected using WEp-128 or something…
I looked at the squeezebox (I was going to blog about it actually!) it does look fantastic. I espeically like the fact that they donate 10% of their profits to the EFF… The only downside is that the device is an 11b device rather than the faster 11g – the moment you put it on your network it slows the whole thing down, even the communication between two other 11g devices.
Oh, I forgot to mention another good thing about SlimDevice’s Squeezebox – the server software is opensourced. As a result, lots of people have written plugins for it to support other audio formats (such as encrippled ACC files, or streaming Real audio). One guy even wrote a plugin to display the BBC’s news ticker on the LCD display when not in use!