David@Mabushii

Laptop wireless acting up? Too expensive to repair or purchase a new one? Getting a USB WiFi adapter may be your solution!

When considering an external adapter to replace an internal faulty one, many thoughts come to mind such as Cost, Size, Signal Strength, Compatibility, etc. This post will summarize my personal experiences with the Prolink WN2000 for the past few weeks.

Pros

The Prolink WN2000 adapter is 30(L) x 14(W) x 7(H) mm in size, making it extremely portable, when compared to other USB WiFi adapters.

The installation is fairly hassle free, as it comes with a quick installation guide, providing step-by-step instructions.

The drivers come on a mini-cd, and is compatible with Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7. (Win7 compatibility isn’t mentioned, but it did work on mine, so yeah :p)

The mini-cd also includes a connection configuration utility software to assist the user in managing their WiFi access points.

Cons

The small size of the adapter comes as a trade-off for performance, as signal strength may suffer when the adapter is too far away from the WiFi access point.

The connection configuration utility software may be hard to understand, due to lack of supporting documents. (The manual is obtained from the Prolink website, but I got greeted with a 404 error when I needed it)

The adapter’s USB head does not come with a cover to shield it from wear and tear and/or invasion from dust bunnies. So some users may want to keep it in a small pouch of sorts.

Verdict

The WN2000 is a decent adapter for users whom favour portability over performance, as the adapter is small enough from risk of bend-and-break situations. Performance-wise, it is sufficient for normal web-browsing and usage, but some people may find it lacking when it comes to online gaming (ping & latency). Its cost might be a little higher then the regular sized adapters, but is certainly not one of the most expensive ones, as the WN2000 has been out for some time. Just for reference, I obtained my WN2000 for S$29 at Challenger. Too lazy to shop around for cheaper locations I guess? ^^;

Messing around with VI/VIM on Linux recently, and found that editing on a text screen isn’t that bad at all!

But of course, I would prefer having a GUI an syntax highlighting, but its good to learn something new everyday~

For folks out there who need a guide to using VIM, follow this link!

Also check out Notepad++, its a pretty decent replacement for Notepad IMHO.

So we’ve heard about these terms all the time (well, sometimes…), but what do they mean to the normal user?

FAT
FAT is also known as FAT16. This is one of the older format used for smaller disk drives, or storage medium. It is recommended that storage mediums smaller then or equals 256MB stick to this format. The reason being FAT16 is more efficient in terms of speed and space on volumes smaller then 256MB, as compared to FAT32 or NTFS.

Of course, it also depends on the device you wish to use the storage medium on. FAT16 is supported by operating systems (OS) MS-DOS and above, and thus, is useful for recovery thumbdrives of sizes up to 2GB, being the maximum limit of FAT16.

FAT32
FAT32 is the 32bit version of FAT. The advantage it has over FAT is that it allows for smaller file clusters (4kb up to 8GB storage), as compared to FAT16 (32kb up to 2GB storage).

The biggest problem that FAT32 has, is that the maximum individual file size must not exceed 4GB. This is bad for folks doing video editing, as files often exceed 4GB in size. It is highly recommended that a partition dedicated to video editing be converted to NTFS, if the user does not require the use of older OS’s like Windows95 or Windows98, and some older Linux distros.

Its is recommended for storage mediums exceeded 2GB and smaller then 32GB be formatted in FAT32, for efficiency reasons. FAT32 is supported by OS Windowns95-R2 and above.

NTFS

The most recent format that every windows user probably has, NTFS contains useful features like disk compression as well as security features like encryption, both of which FAT16 and FAT32 does not support. Also, NTFS volumes support files with filesize bigger then 4GB!

If you have storage mediums with huge capacities (>32GB), or require sensitive files to be stored on them, it is highly recommended that the storage medium be in NTFS format.

NTFS is supported by Windows2000-SP4, WindowsXP and above, along with the latest Linux distros.

Conclusion
Which format should you use? It really does boil down to the storage medium’s size, usage, and OS available to you.

In general, thumbdrives <2GB should be in FAT16, and can be used for recovery purposes. Thumbdrives <16GB should be in FAT32, and used in conjunction with encryption software if you are required to store sensitive information on them. Portable harddrives should be in NTFS or FAT32, depending on your usage of them. For example, avid Windows users can safely use NTFS volumes, while folks looking to making portable booting drives with Linux distros should stick to FAT32, until all the distros provide native NTFS support.

Just a quick post! I’m sure everyone has a certain amount of experience when it comes to using Google. Here is a cheatsheet for those whom are interested in ways to refine their search when using Google!

Need to work on your own OS but find lugging around a laptop too troublesome? Now you can! Just bring along an USB stick with F10 installed on it! (Or any other linux distribution for that matter).

As posted on Lifehacker, with just a few easy steps, you will be able to have a bootable USB stick with Fedora installed.

Of course, the easy part is the installation of the system. Once you have the OS booted and running, you may or may not face a couple of driver hiccups for the wireless card on your laptop/desktop.

I encountered the above named problem on my HP tx1222au laptop. After much googling and experimenting, I found that using the Autoten RPM scripts helped to solve my Broadcom Wireless (BCM4312) b43 driver problems.

There are a few other solutions that I have not tried, but one of them is the real Linux Broadcom driver (broadcom-wl). You can find the step-by-step instructions here.  The steps are repeated below:

Code:

su
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
yum update
yum install broadcom-wl

The third method is to use Ndiswrapper to wrap the window drivers for use in a Linux environment.

1. First, grab the windows version of the driver. The SYS and INF files are needed.
2. Next, you will need to install ndiswrapper:
   

   Code:

   su -
   rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
   yum update
   yum install ndiswrapper
   ndiswrapper -i [driver INF filename here]
   ndiswrapper -mi

3. Once done, reboot the machine or restart the network connection manager.

I hope these steps have proven useful to anyone who had trouble with their Broadcom wireless cards.