Re: Belkin Adapters

On Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:05:37 -0400, Christopher A. Lee
<calee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This surprised me until I discovered how USB uses up CPU.

<http://utils.newfreeware.com/utils/1506/download/>
14 day trial or you pay $70. The lite version will do the basics
after the 14 days.

Wouldn't surprise me though. Most of this stuff is badly written crap
because it costs too much to write decent software.

Actually, I find that my speeds are very close to the legal limit
(480Mbit/sec) for USB file transfers from a USB attached hard disk. I
would expect similar performance with wireless. However, I can't find
my numbers, so I'll run a quick test later today.

I have no problem dealing keeping up with the video stream unless I've
got conflicting security packages. These figures are from the
performance monitor.

Permon is quite accurate but not as good as iperf and jperf for
benchmarking.

I run HD MP4 off a shared network disk. No problems at all with the
300 mbps express card but stuttering if I use USB.

Yep, serial versus parallel again. However, please note that Wi-Fi is
inherently a serial protocol, with the added bonus of being half
duplex. With streaming video, the half duplex is not as big a hit as
you would expect because of the asymmetrical bandwidth. Protocol
overhead is what slows thruput down to about half the connection
speed.

This is as reported on the task manager and performance monitor. The
latter "adds things up" to get what should be a fairly accurate
throughput. Although it does have its own overheads.

I'll trust Perfmon not the speeds reported by the connection manager
or WZC.

Oddly enough their USB dongle and the Netgear equivalent report
varying speeds in the places you would look for it in.

Good. If you can see changes, then the reporting program is probably
giving an honest speed indication. However, please note that the
connection speed can be different for each direction, and literally
for each packet. I don't know if the Netgear connection manager
reports an average, peak, or wild guess.

People do listen though. Especially when they are planning a network.

Well, nobody listens to me and I don't do much planning. However, I
do quite a bit of damage control, which is a good indication that
something is not being planned or calculated. When I start seeing
real numbers, test results, and calculations, then I'll know that
there's been some planning. I don't see much of that in my work or in
this newsgroup.

One of the reasons I chose my router: Netgear claim that when the
standard is finalised this will reflected in a (probably just
firmware?) upgrade,

Prediction: When the standard is eventually released for general
consumption, there is going to be a flurry of updates, only some of
which will be functional, tested, and stable. My guess is that the
problems will take at least 3 firmware updates to nail down. Maybe
more if the vendor cares about cross vendor interoperability.

If you mean WZC (wireless zero config) is a bit flakey, that's an

I was being diplomatic.

Why? Bashing Microsoft is almost a national sport. Everyone hates
them. I still think back in horror at the days before MS, when CP/M
was the high fashion operating system. I dread to think of what the
world would be like if CP/M had prevailed. MS has certainly had its
problems and made some mistakes, but in general, they've done more
good than evil. Unfortunately TCP/IP, wireless, networking, and in
particular, WZC are areas where MS has done rather badly. I sometimes
wonder if whomever wrote the drivers and user interface tools had ever
even operated a real wireless network.

I agree with all of these. Error recovery on the network is
particularly bad.

Yep. A great example is WZC and WPA. Type in the wrong WPA pass
phrase (twice) and WZC will attempt to connect, fail, and not give a
clue what's wrong. Worse, it's a rather tricky and non-obvious mess
trying to fix the pass phrase. Same problem if you change the WPA
pass phrase on the router. Extra credit for the brilliant user
interface decision, where double clicking on an SSID in the "view
available networks" window, offers to disable automatic connection,
which is stupid when the user just want to try again at typing in the
right WPA pass phrase.

I use the machines as tools. Having been a mainframe architecture
level hardware professional in my professional life I don't need to be
a PC nerd now.

I have dad news for you. PC's are like quicksand. Once you jump into
the muck, you're going to sink deeper and deeper into the
technobabble, acronyms, and bug chasing exercises. There's no way you
can turn a PC into a real appliance type system (such as a banking ATM
machine) and not get involved in the technology.

Not being in the best of health it's not always convenient to use the
desktop PC so I need to do the same things using the same files from
the laptop. Hence the need for a wireless network that operates as the
manufacturers advertise.

Get well please. The world need competent computer types.

The justifications for wireless and many and varied. As I previously
ranted, there's no way to make a system that works for every possible
configuration and use. I mention HD video as the worst case but there
are others. Like any technology, leave yourself some headroom and
don't run the technology at full throttle all the time. With
wireless, all the manufacturers lie to varying degrees. Sometimes,
they don't even know the difference between their marketing baloney
and reality. If you need a good dose of reality, see Tim Higgins
writings on:
<http://www.smallnetbuilder.com>

To be honest I'm disappointed how little the manufacturers do to help.

It's not easy for them. For example, Netgear is now on its 3rd
generation (and I think 3rd chipset supplier) for 802.11n products and
the specification hasn't even been finalized. I would not expect
support to be up to speed on what appears to be an endless beta test.
Also, support does not have the benefits of hands on experience. It's
much like reading about wireless from a book. You don't really
understand the problems until you've experienced them first hand. For
support, just identifying the problems over the phone are difficult
mostly because the average caller does not have the appropriate
vocabulary to describe the problem (much less describe their own
system). Fortunately, about 90% of the problems are simple user or
installation errors, which support can usually handle with a scripted
troubleshooting tree. Suggestion: reduce your expectations.

And especially disappointed that they use different chipsets and
drivers in adapters that behave differently even though they're sold
in the same box with the same labeling.

Chuckle. Welcome to marketing. There are now 9 different mutations
of the Linksys WRT54G, each with radically different guts, but nearly
identical packaging. This is mostly to avoid stocking and chargeback
issues with dealers. When a company issues a new hardware release,
the first thing that happens is that the distributors immediately
return all their "old" stock as unsellable. They only can sell the
absolute latest. So, the manufacturers respond by making the packages
and model numbers nearly indistinguishable. It works.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@xxxxxxxxxx
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
.

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