Cheap Wireless for Old Laptop at home

Ernie · 27 Mar 2007 at 22:35

Basically my Wife wishes to use her old IBM thinkpad in the lounge at the front of the house. Our broadband connection is the old Fixed wall socket in a room at the back of the house.

Currently I've got a wired router connecting 2 PC's in that room. I'd quite like to keep them wired as they're on a LAN, and they're not WI-FI anyway.

SO what's the easiest and cheapest way to get a wireless connection to the Laptop, just for internet browsing to aid with a degree she is studying for.

I assume a USB wireless 54mbps adaptor on the Laptop and a basic wireless router of some kind.

Could the wireless router be connected to the wired router?

Any advice on products and set-up much appreciated.

Thanks

teulk · 28 Mar 2007 at 05:55

Just get yourself a wireless router, you can still have your 2 PC's wired as it will have 4 ports to connect to just like the router you have at the moment. Obviously the laptop will connect via the wireless connection. As for what router to buy i cant really recomend one. I had a NETGEAR wireless router and found it totally rubbish so i bought a wireless PEAK router from my local computer shop for around £25 and its fantastic and was so simple to install - it was basically just a case of connecting it up and i had it working within 10mins if taking out of the box.

Ernie · 28 Mar 2007 at 15:32

OK thanks teulk,

And the USB adaptor is fine for the Laptop, anyone any experience of them?

teulk · 28 Mar 2007 at 16:41

Ernie said:
OK thanks teulk,

And the USB adaptor is fine for the Laptop, anyone any experience of them?

Unfortunately my lap top has a built in card so i have no experience of a usb adaptor or even what kind of card you could use.....

!bluetonic! · 29 Mar 2007 at 09:20

As for the connection of the laptop:

I run an old P166 Mhz with 32 MB RAM.
It has Windows 98 SE on it and has a PCMCIA 54G wireless network card.
It runs Firefox web browser rather well and it stable.

There's an app I downloaded from McAfee which allows Windows 98 to use the secure WPA connection, rather than WEP.

If you have a spare PCMCIA slot, I personally recommend these.