Wireless (again)

[Al Thompson]

Well, I FINALLY got wireless working on my Compaq laptop.  I never got the interal Broadcom wlan working, but I got a Belkin USB wirless to work last night, after months of fiddling with it.

Now I have one related problem:  My mouse is also USB, and whenever there is heavy wireless activity, my mouse doesn't work at all.  Is there a way around this, or is it just the nature of having two USB devices?  I thought there was a way to "reserve" a certain bandwidth for each device, but can't find anything on it.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks.

[Max Pyziur]

On Thu, 24 Jan 2008, Al Thompson wrote:
> Well, I FINALLY got wireless working on my Compaq laptop.  I never got 
> the interal Broadcom wlan working, but I got a Belkin USB wirless to 
> work last night, after months of fiddling with it.
>
> Now I have one related problem:  My mouse is also USB, and whenever 
> there is heavy wireless activity, my mouse doesn't work at all.  Is 
> there 
> a way around this, or is it just the nature of having two USB devices? 
> I thought there was a way to "reserve" a certain bandwidth for each 
> device, but can't find anything on it.

Good to hear that someone has had success on this front. I, too, have been 
trying to get consistent WiFi results. I've been working with three 
different NICs, one USB, the other two PCMCIA.

The one one with which I've been successful has been a Netgear WG111US 
Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter. However, its performance has been erratic. I can 
successfully connect to my WAP, work for a while, and then the connection 
drops. I notice that the device gets especially hot and am wondering if 
this is the cause for its eventual failure. Comments?

On the PCMCIA front, I've been testing two cards: an old Linksys WPC111 
(only 802.11b) and a Netgear WPNT511.

WPC111:
lcpci does not see the Linksys WPC111, but ifconfig -a does. I can assign 
a static IP to the WPC111 and use other commands to configure it to work 
with my WAP but I get no throughput.

WPNT511:
lscpi identifies the Netgear WPNT511, but ifconfig -a does not. I have 
used ndiswrapper to load the appropriate driver and my results are still 
the same.

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 600m, btw.

I have no problem getting a PCMCIA Netgear Ethernet card (Linksys 
EtherFast 10/100 Integrated CardBus PC Card PCM200B) to work, btw. W/o any 
droppoff. The built-in Ethernet on the Laptop failed. Apparently, other 
Inspiron 600m users have mentioned that the Ethernet port has high failure 
rates.

As for wireless, some reviewes mention that the Dell Inspiron 600m has 
been shipped with Wifi, either Centrino or a mini PCI card bolted into one 
of the bays. This one appears to have neither. Or is there a tool/command 
for checking for onboard Centrino.

Much thanks in advance for any replies.
> Anyone have any suggestions?
>
> Thanks.

Max Pyziur
[e-mail]

[Jarosław Górny]

On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:52:59 -0500 (EST)
Max Pyziur  wrote:
> On the PCMCIA front, I've been testing two cards: an old Linksys
> WPC111 (only 802.11b) and a Netgear WPNT511.

I currently use Linksys WPC 54G (rev3.1) and it works OK. A while ago I
had to use ndiswrapper to force it to work, but it's no longer
necessary (now works with bcm43xx).
I've tried 'no security', 'WEP' and 'WPA2' (with wpa_supplicant) - all
of them work.
> As for wireless, some reviewes mention that the Dell Inspiron 600m
> has been shipped with Wifi, either Centrino or a mini PCI card bolted
> into one of the bays. This one appears to have neither. Or is there a
> tool/command for checking for onboard Centrino.

Go and try to find it in BIOS. I've got Inspiron 6400. In BIOS settings
I can see that 'on-board WIFI is present' and 'on-board Bluetooth is
missing' - which both are true ;) So I'm sure Your 600m will also tell
You the truth.

regards,