Nearly complete with the wireless network.

It's ironic, that I bought a Wireless N router (300Mbps), only to end up with both my netbook and desktop running on 802.11 b/g.

My desktop has two cards, but the 802.11 n Airlink card which I've had for awhile but haven't used in awhile either, wouldn't connect.  No idea why it wouldn't connect; it'd do the WPS (wireless protected setup) connect a couple of times but never passed through internet connection; tried upgrading the driver but still wouldn't connect.

My other card (the first one I had installed on my computer years ago) was just a 802.11 b/g card, but the problem was, something happened and then suddenly it wouldn't work.  Well, I figure before I go out and buy a new card, I'd give that D-Link card a try.  It took me a few times going back and forth with my netbook online, but I finally figured out that Windows XP SP3 was the culprit of why the D-Link card stopped working, and I was able to get the correct driver update from D-Link's website.  So with a matter of a couple of button presses, I got the WPS connection to go, and voila, I have two computers running at 54Mbps while the wireless router is rated for 300Mbps.

Of course, my internet access isn't even close to 54Mbps, so one would think that it shouldn't matter what speed the router and computer connections are, but the thing is, it does matter.  It matters because I'm going to end up hooking up - first - a USB drive to my router - and later on - a network attached storage device.  If my computer - where I perform all my ripping of my CD and DVD collection - only has a 54Mbps wireless connection, it means that it'll take 5 1/2 x longer to transfer files from my desktop to the NAS / USB networked drive.  If you've ever ripped a DVD and tried to move it from one physical drive to another, you know how long it already takes, even when running SATA.

So far, I've tested running streaming video from the internet and from local files on the netbook, and while it'll run native videos without a hitch, it will not process 720p via Youtube; I'm getting something close to 2 fps running 720p online, which is really bad.  Streaming h.264 video natively is perfectly fine.  It has nothing to do with cache, because I'll wait for the video to completely finish downloading before I run it, and it just won't run smoothly.  I know it has to do with video decoding on the netbook, because I can run 1080p streaming from the desktop, wirelessly.

Too bad; I guess netbooks still need more power.

-forgot to mention-

When first setting up the network, I played around with locations of the wireless modem (WiMax) and the wireless router.  It turns out that the wireless router will significantly degrade the signal of the wireless modem the closer they are located to each other, and the wireless modem significantly interferes with some OTA digital TV antenna signals if placed too close to each other.  So much for a clean and easy install.