George Ou from TechRepublic discuss how to performs wireless LAN site survey using some free and commercial tools.
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Ready to lose those pesky headphone wires? The IOGear Wireless Stereo Headphones set you free with Bluetooth 1.2 and offer an impressive 66-foot range. They’re very easy to use and they sound good so much better than other Bluetooth headphones. The headphones fit over your ears and around the back of your head. You can also pair them with your Bluetooth-enabled cell phone. What’s cool is that if you make or receive a call while you’re listening to music, your tunes will pause and then resume once you end the call. |
These headphones are about as good as Bluetooth headphones get.
| Zoom’s X-series modems have been around for a while, but this latest top-of-the-range model introduces a couple of new features. The X6 is the first Zoom product to support ADSL 2/2+, and it also includes a full wireless-G router with ‘Prism Nitro’ (a special chipset feature), for improved performance. |
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The design is quite simple, matching the rest of the Zoom family: all black, only a single curved edge at the front to take away from the boxy looks. There’s an internal and external antenna (the latter isn’t removable), and a power switch at the back. There’s also a grand total of 13 LEDs, but unfortunately some are on the front of the unit, some at the back, so problems may not be obvious.
Some products are easy to review, and you know almost immediately whether they’ll be good or bad. This one is less straightforward. Take the physical design, for instance. It’s bulky so there’s no wall-mount option, and the all-black design won’t blend in with most PCs. Yet on the other hand it conveniently has two detachable antenna, and the rare inclusion of a power switch is welcome, too. Then there’s the documentation. It looks impressive at first – a full printed book – but only 16 pages are in English.
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Almost all of our modem or routers connect to your PC via a network port, which can be a problem if you don’t have one. That’s not an issue if you opt for the SAR-600EW, though, as it enables you to connect via USB instead. It wouldn’t be our first choice (USB devices are likely to be more CPU-intensive and thus less reliable), but it’s worth a try if you’re short on other options.
One difficulty of having two interfaces is that it lengthens the setup process a little, at least for experienced users. You can’t simply plug in the SAR-600EW, reboot and connect to it from a browser, say. Instead, you must run an installation program first, choose how you’re connecting to your PC and the Web and follow the steps that it presents. If you’re a complete network and PC novice, though, the setup program proves to be useful guide on what to do.
This Netgear router is compact enough to fit anywhere and the silver-white colour scheme means it should find a home in the most style-conscious of living rooms. There’s intelligent design beneath the looks, too. Clip-on plastic feet are provided if you’d prefer to save space and mount the modem vertically. The single adjustable antenna is removable and uses a standard SMA connection, so it’s easy to install another. Furthermore, default settings such as its IP address, user name and password are printed on the base of the unit – handy if you’ve a tendency to lose manuals.
Netgear also appears to be just about the only company around which understands that a Setup Wizard is supposed to be helpful, not just ask for cryptic settings over a series of pages. When configuring ADSL it provides an option to automatically detect your settings.
Whether you’re a networking expert or not, it helps to have clear guidance when you’re setting up a new modem or router. Linksys had provided a cluttered configuration screen but no Setup Wizard for the Wireless-G ADSL Gateway. Unlike most of the competition, Linksys has printed a Quick Install sheet specifically for users. That means there’s no need to ask your ISP what you should put for Encapsulation, VPI, VCI and so on, because you’re told everything you need to know. Perhaps ‘everything’ is a mild exaggeration, but there’s more help to be found. Every browser-based setup screen has a ‘More…’ link that displays comprehensive guidance on the options you’ve got available.
| They’re an impressive set of options, including SNMP, UPnP, port forwarding (single or a range), port triggering and QoS. Furthermore, unexpected bonus features include a Dynamic Domain Name System (which works with www.dyndns.com to assign a fixed host and domain name to a dynamic IP address), Internet content filters (block cookies, Java applets, Activex) and multiple Internet access policies (block access at particular times of day, by specific URLs, keywords and more. |
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