Wireless Installation Checklist

By: Lee Asher

Buyer Beware - Ignorance can be a financial waste and a lot of
hassals. Before you buy any wireless equipment, you need to be
sure about what you're doing. There's nothing worse than having
everything there and finding that it doesn't work in your house,
or with your computers, or over the distances you need. Here's a
handy checklist of the things that you really ought to do before
you go out and spend any of your hard-earned cash on wireless
networking equipment.

Interference Checks

While it won't stop a wireless network from working altogether,
interference in its frequency range can slow it down
significantly, as well as reducing its range. If something is
causing interference, the first thing you'll know about it is
when your connection stops working -- unless you know what to
look for.

There are two very common causes of wireless interference:
wireless phones and microwave ovens. 2.4Ghz, the most common
wireless networking frequency, is also a commonly-used wireless
phone frequency. It is possible, though, to find phones that use
other frequencies. Microwave ovens, on the other hand, operate
at around 2.4Ghz by definition. It should be alright to have
devices like these in your house, but certainly not in the same
room as any computer that you plan to use a wireless connection
with.

Wall Construction

Wireless can, in theory, pass through walls and other partitions
easily. In practice, though, some walls are more solid than
others, which means that they are more likely to block some of
the signal. Note that it's only your interior partitions that
matter, not the exterior ones. This does, however, include your
floors, if you want the connection to work between levels.

Wireless does well with partitions made from: drywall, plywood,
other wood (including doors), glass.

Wireless has trouble with: brick, plaster, cement, metal, stone,
double-glazed glass.

Basically, it's all to do with how porous the materials are --
ones that let more of other things through also let more of your
wireless signal through.

If you have a wall made of one of the 'bad' materials, it's not
the end of the world. It just means that your wireless
connection might have a slower speed or a shorter range. You may
want to spend more than you otherwise would to get better
equipment and overcome this problem.

Decide Your Budget.

You need to stand back, take a look at your needs, and decide
how much you're going to spend. Do you have long distances to
cover? Do you want your connection to go through stone walls?
Each factor will help you decide how much you should be looking
to spend -- remember that the more problems you have, the more
power you will need. On the other hand, if you live in a small
wooden house, you can probably just go for the cheapest thing
you can find.

Read Reviews.

It's well worth searching a site like amazon.com for wireless
equipment, and taking a look at people's reviews to see what the
different brands out there are like, and what you can get for
your money. It is always a very bad idea to buy something
without getting a second, third and fourth opinion, especially
if you're buying it online. If you can, try to get to a computer
shop and see some wireless networking equipment in action before
you commit yourself.

Install and Update Windows XP.

Finally, your wireless life will really be improved if you have
the latest version of Windows. Because wireless is such a new
technology, it wasn't really around in any significant way back
when Windows 98, ME and 2000 were released, and support for them
wasn't built in to the system. You'll have a lot more trouble
getting wireless to work on systems like these than you would on
Windows XP.

Even if you've got Windows XP, though, that doesn't solve the
problem entirely. Windows XP Service Pack 2 (an updated version
of Windows XP) contains much easier-to-use tools for configuring
and using wireless than the un-updated versions do. If you've
been using your copy of Windows for a while without updating it,
you should really make sure you've got all the latest updates
from http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com before you go any
further.

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Original Source: Articles
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