Wifi Speed Help

[spray]

Wasn't sure were to post this, i do need help though!

I ordered myself a new laptop for uni on friday night (w00t) and am now faced with the prospect of moving my data off the family pc and onto my laptop.

I have my music collection on there which totals about 14gb and then about 2gb worth of other stuff including my gp32 games and emus and school work etc

My shiny new laptop comes with 802.11b as standard, in order to use the broadband connection we have i plan on buying a pci wifi card and then simply networking the two together.

Whilst this doesnt phase me, i do have one question, how fast can i actually move data from one hard drive to another using a wifi connection (802.11b) if anyone could give me an estimate in megabytes per second that'd be great!

I've searched goggle a bit, but the myriad of big b's and little b's has left we quite confused and i'd like to know some real world figures as opposed to "manufactuers guidelines"

Thank you very much

 

[Nitro]

If you've got a 802.11b wireless network, then the maximum speed you are going to get is 11Mbs a second which is about 1.4 megabytes a second.

So you're probably looking at a couple of hours atleast to transfer 16gb.

 

[spray]

thank you nitro!

so the small b's are refering to bits as opposed to bytes, cool.

well, my documents currently runs at about 18gbs so...

3hrs 53mins 20secs

But, i think i can just use my karma to transfer all my music files across which only leaves about a 4gb so thats only...

49mins.

Cool.

What a fun life i lead...

 

[finty]

karma

im sorry if this is a stupid question, but what?

 

[gary]

hi,

i did a similar thing not too long back - i had to trasfar 18gig over a wireless network to back up an older machine.

it does take a lot longer then a hardwired network - i simply left everything copying and went to bed - got up in the morning and everything had trasfared.

just make sure you have a good signal - i was on the edge of my signal "bubble" and it stopped transfaring a few times and had to start over. as long as your connections got a good strength you shouldnt have too many probs

Gary

 

[spray]

karma

im sorry if this is a stupid question, but what?

ah, the rio karma!

its a 20gb mp3, in my opinion, the best out there.

it supports ogg, mp3, wma, wav and FLAC, has a fourteen hour (up to 16) real world battery, has gapless playback, no little pauses as with nearly every other player, and does cross fading between tracks.

the company website is here

www.rioaudio.com

and the ign review can be found here

gear.ign.com/articles/458/458401p1.html

worth checking out if your in the market for an mp3 player.

 

[spray]

hi at

i did a similar thing not too long back - i had to trasfar 18gig over a wireless network to back up an older machine.

it does take a lot longer then a hardwired network - i simply left everything copying and went to bed - got up in the morning and everything had trasfared.

just make sure you have a good signal - i was on the edge of my signal "bubble" and it stopped transfaring a few times and had to start over. as long as your connections got a good strength you shouldnt have too many probs

Gary

cheers gary,

glad to hear that someone else has accomplished this!

i will put my notebook and the pc side by side and then go to bed as suggested.

 

[gearhead23]

Why don't you just get a cross wire network cable and make a temporary peer to peer network?

 

[spray]

i thought of that, but my pc doesnt have an rj45 or any other form of networking capability.

i'll be needing a wireless link for my laptop when im using it round the house and its far cheaper to buy a pci wifi card than get a network card and then router and wireless adapter.

 

[MegatronUK]

<looks at the rats nest of switched 100BaseT cat5 cables running through house and wonders why anyone would want to use horrendously slow wireless ethernet>

 

[Dozer]

I prefer wired to be honest. And now we have 2 network points in every room in the house all neatly wired to wall sockets from under the floorboards. But wireless would b nice even for stuff like the upcoming psp and and pocket pcs i might get.