[i_wolf]

Hi guys I want to connect two pc's to an apple 802.11g basestation and run them in full 802.11g , there are presently 2 macs connected in 802.11g mode.
What i want to know is if anybody can recommend a good pci card for 802.11g for use in winxp pc's or if there are any cards that i should avoid. I want something that will run reliably and happily with an apple extreme basestation.
I was reading around and i've heard some PC PCI cards do not work well with the airport extreme basestation even though they are supposed to adhere to the 802.11g standard.... ive heard that people have had problems with linksys pci cards in win xp when trying to connect to apple airport extreme basestation ... any truth in this at all???

Any help or suggestions??? Thanks guys.
Kind Regards
i_wolf

P.S.... how easy did you guys find it to get the pc's up and running with the airport extreme base station???

[Langdon]

nevermind

[ghporter]

I hate to have to say this, but a LOT of clients have problems working with the AirPort Extreme base. Including Apple clients. That leads me to believe that it ain't the clients...

Anywhoo, what did you decide on? Just curious.

[i_wolf]

dude you have just worried me because i have ordered my airport extreme basestationa and its due tomorrow. I thought that there were no more problems with the latest firmware for the basestation??
To be honest i was thinking of going with the belkin PCI 802.11g card. seamed like good price and their stuff has always been reliable for me up till now. But i haven't ordered any pci cards yet so i really need your advice guys. which pci card is the lesser of all evils! given that i can't return the apple basestation.
Is the basestation really cack??

[rambo47]

I've had zero problems with my AEBS and I have both pc's and Macs's on my little home network. And wireless printing from anywhere in the house on my Mac is really sweet.

[i_wolf]

Hey Rambo thats good to hear. How difficult was it to set up the network. Im very new to OS X networking so i am not sure whats really involved.
Also what wireless cards are you using in your pc's????
the set up our house will be

Dual G5 with airport extreme
iBook G4 with airport extreme
airport extreme basestation
Dual Xeon 2.8 with what network card ??? (Belkin, DLink, Linksys, US Robotics????)
Pentium 3 1GHz with(Belkin Dlink, Linksys, US Robotics???)
Pentium Pro 200 (Belkin, DLink, Linksys, US Robotics???)

Currently all Wintel machines are on a wired network, however i believe now is the time to go wireless. But i am looking high and low for a good wireless card for the wintel machines. I have heard so much positive and negative about each manufacturers cards so far with regard to interoperability with another manufacturers basestation its not funny. its making the decision very very hard.

[ghporter]

I didn't say every AEBS would have problems, but that there are a lot of people experiencing problems with a variety of client cards. I don't know how much better things are with the newest firmware, but there are a lot of boxes on shelves that have older firmware, and I haven't seen Apple stand up and tell owners to upgrade if they have specific problems. I think the earlier problems were related to Apple's implementation of the draft "G" standard, which seemed to be different from most other implementations. I hope the newest firmware puts this set of problems behind us, but if that is the fix, the word needs to be spread.

[rambo47]

My Macs have a mix of AirPort and AirPort Extreme cards. On the pc's, one has an Orinoco WaveLan Silver card while the other has a NetGear 802.11b card.

As for the AEBS setup, the wizard walks you through it. Macs seem to find the network rigtht away while the pc's sometimes take a little trial and error, especially with
WEP encryption.

[aaanorton]

Just announced.

[ranga]

Hi,

I've been using a Linksys WMP54G PCI 802.11g card in my Windows XP box and my G4 running 10.3.

I haven't had any problems configuring the cards to talk to my AEBS (I have WEP enabled and I'm running a closed network). My G4 recognized the card as a Airport card and let me configure it as such. I had some problems with Win2K so I upgraded to XP. In XP I was able to configure the card using the standard network control panel.

I have had some problems on Win XP with this card and RDC/VNC. Session will intermittently hang for several seconds (10 or more). SMB and SSH connections to the XP box don't seem to have this problem so I think that it is just something specific to RDC/VNC.

--ranga

[Eugene]

The Linksys WMP54G has a crappy SMA connector on the PCI card...if you twist on the antenna too tightly it will come off. Go with the Belkin or Sonnet instead...They both look to be the same reference card...

Also get a better antenna than the tiny little 3 dBi rubber duck they provide. The Linksys comes with a 5 dBi rubber duck.

All have much worse range than my QuickSilver's built-in antenna...

[ghporter]

Eugene's problems are a combination of being a bit to "enthusiastic" with the antenna connector (those tiny connectors ARE very delicate, but they are also EXTREMELY low loss, so that's the tradeoff), and the fact that all PCI cards seem to point into a wall, which lowers the signal level and gives you some interesting signal reflections.

External and remote antennas are just about mandatory with a PCI wireless set up, but you have to be careful to place them as close as possible to the card so that you don't get too much loss from an overly long cable. It's a tradeoff that isn't very nice, but that's how this stuff works.

One option is to use a USB wireless NIC. There are some that support Mac OS, and have external antennas as well (or have a remote USB connector-a better choice if you see it). If you have fast USB, there shouldn't be any degradation of speed with a modern USB wireless NIC.