On Wednesday 21 July 2004 22:11, IanBell wrote:
Broadband seems finaly to have arrived at my small coastal village. I have a Dell laptop with an Ethernet port and no network. Assuming I go for a wires only package, what is the most suitable hardware?
Don't even bother with the USB ADSL modems unless you like spending hours messing with hotplug scripts, buggy black box drivers, unstable hardware etc etc...
Get yourself a Broadband router. You shouldn't have to spend that much. Only a few things to watch on these.
A few describe themselves as Broadband routers but don't actually contain the broadband interface, they are simply a router.
Some don't handle GRE packets very well, not really an issue unless you find yourself wanting to connect to (or provide) some types of VPN (specifically the ones provided by Windows Servers) Probably not an issue for you (it was for me)
Alternatively if you have a tiny bit more spare cash, treat yourself to a Wireless Broadband Router and a PCMCIA wireless card, that way you can enjoy the garden/ company of your significant other etc etc without prying yourself from the net. After all what's the point of a laptop if it's tethered to the phone line ?
Personally I have had good performance from Linksys and Netgear kit here (Linksys finally seem to have come clean on the GPL front)
Just don't forget to set up the security properly
If you really must go for a USB modem, then The Alcatel/Thompson ones work unless they are silver (they could have fixed that now) The Sagem ones work and I have read in a forum somewhere that the BT Voyager 100 can be made to work as well (But then you never would go with BT would you ???) Generally though they are all pretty nasty things.