Which Laptop gives this...?????????
Discussion
Hooli said:
Gorvid said:
Great post...
Sounds like I should really focus on a decent lappy with a good battery. As the internet speed will be fine whatever..
Gorvid, i take it your on a BT homehub there? if so put 192.168.1.254 in your browser address bar & see what speed the hub says its connected at. you'll never get more than about 80-90% of that speed in the real world, so you may be trying for the impossible if its the actual line speed limiting you.Sounds like I should really focus on a decent lappy with a good battery. As the internet speed will be fine whatever..
if its a BT voyager, same thing but use 192.168.1.1
i've just used that TCP optimiser from page 2, definatly seems to have stablised my browsing to what was a 'fast moment'. only took a few secs to run as well, impressed so far.
Upstream Line Rate 448 Kbps
Kinky said:
wondering at what point the PH posting rules were broken 
Totally unacceptable.
Just a note to say that appropriate action is being taken and under no circumstance is this acceptable. Using the "rule of real life", it's unlikely that anyone would mouth off so readily face to face, and PH is no different.Totally unacceptable.
K
Kinky said:
Kinky said:
wondering at what point the PH posting rules were broken
Totally unacceptable.
Just a note to say that appropriate action is being taken and under no circumstance is this acceptable. Using the "rule of real life", it's unlikely that anyone would mouth off so readily face to face, and PH is no different.Totally unacceptable.
K
Deva Link said:
Kinky said:
Kinky said:
wondering at what point the PH posting rules were broken
Totally unacceptable.
Just a note to say that appropriate action is being taken and under no circumstance is this acceptable. Using the "rule of real life", it's unlikely that anyone would mouth off so readily face to face, and PH is no different.Totally unacceptable.
K
You mean the stuff thats still there???
Or was some deleted?
Gorvid said:
Deva Link said:
Kinky said:
Kinky said:
wondering at what point the PH posting rules were broken
Totally unacceptable.
Just a note to say that appropriate action is being taken and under no circumstance is this acceptable. Using the "rule of real life", it's unlikely that anyone would mouth off so readily face to face, and PH is no different.Totally unacceptable.
K
You mean the stuff thats still there???
Or was some deleted?
Gorvid I have just today bought myself a laptop and I am posting this message with it whilst lying in bed. My missus always watches tv before going to sleep and I always look at the net (tv is appalling here)on the pc on the next floor. So wanting to be next to my beloved I looked for a laptop that was good enough to surf the net with a decent sized screen.
I bought an Acer Aspire 7004wsmi. It has a 17" screen and surfing the net is fast! OK I subscribe to wired networks being faster and I am plugged into a gigabit network over cat6 but as someone said before, with the internet as opposed to communicating over the local network, it's the net which is the limiting factor for general surfing. Wi-fi is plenty fast enough for the net. This laptop has built in wi-fi.
Anyway my Acer cost me €516.00 which is £344 and I'm very, very happy with it! Don't pay over the odds for a machine which doesn't need to be that powerful.
Cheers
Driller
ETA In relation to the scathing words I'd say the guy kind had it coming, tempers flare sometimes
I bought an Acer Aspire 7004wsmi. It has a 17" screen and surfing the net is fast! OK I subscribe to wired networks being faster and I am plugged into a gigabit network over cat6 but as someone said before, with the internet as opposed to communicating over the local network, it's the net which is the limiting factor for general surfing. Wi-fi is plenty fast enough for the net. This laptop has built in wi-fi.
Anyway my Acer cost me €516.00 which is £344 and I'm very, very happy with it! Don't pay over the odds for a machine which doesn't need to be that powerful.
Cheers
Driller
ETA In relation to the scathing words I'd say the guy kind had it coming, tempers flare sometimes
Edited by Driller on Sunday 16th December 20:48
One little tip to off_again who suggested a Macbook.
I like OS X a great deal, however Apple have decided to use Atheros wireless chipsets in their laptops, both the cheap Macbooks all the way up to the most expensive Macbook Pros.
Sarah is 100% right that Atheros wireless chipsets are shite. She may have been banned, no idea, but I'll stick up for her on this one. They do most of the work in software, and the drivers are written by monkeys.
Performance wireless cards they are NOT. If you don't believe me, pop along to the Apple Support Discussions board (it's easy to find, it's on the Apple.com site) and search for 'airport problem' - Apple call their wireless internet 'airport' and there have been a LOT of people having trouble maintaining a connection or keeping an acceptable speed.
For ultimate performance on wireless, Atheros is NOT the way to go and sadly that eliminates Macs from the game.
Plasticpig is on the money - match the base station / router manufacturer chipset with the laptop card manufacturer. And beware of companies like Belkin who will call a particular device the same model number (e.g. F5D5070) but it's pure luck whose chipset you get in the box, and only one of them has drivers for your OS
Another aspect worth looking at is interference, if you live in a block of apartments full of 'young professionals' in a big city then there'll be wireless routers, cordless phones, microwave ovens, all spewing out on 2.4 GHz and performance will be poor. One trick to get round this is to try to find some old 802.11a kit that works on the 5 GHz spectrum and is less vulnerable to interference from other people's routers. Another is to use a 'stumbler' to see exactly who else is near your house, and choose a different 'channel' to them in your base station settings (1 to 13 in mine).
I like OS X a great deal, however Apple have decided to use Atheros wireless chipsets in their laptops, both the cheap Macbooks all the way up to the most expensive Macbook Pros.
Sarah is 100% right that Atheros wireless chipsets are shite. She may have been banned, no idea, but I'll stick up for her on this one. They do most of the work in software, and the drivers are written by monkeys.
Performance wireless cards they are NOT. If you don't believe me, pop along to the Apple Support Discussions board (it's easy to find, it's on the Apple.com site) and search for 'airport problem' - Apple call their wireless internet 'airport' and there have been a LOT of people having trouble maintaining a connection or keeping an acceptable speed.
For ultimate performance on wireless, Atheros is NOT the way to go and sadly that eliminates Macs from the game.
Plasticpig is on the money - match the base station / router manufacturer chipset with the laptop card manufacturer. And beware of companies like Belkin who will call a particular device the same model number (e.g. F5D5070) but it's pure luck whose chipset you get in the box, and only one of them has drivers for your OS
Another aspect worth looking at is interference, if you live in a block of apartments full of 'young professionals' in a big city then there'll be wireless routers, cordless phones, microwave ovens, all spewing out on 2.4 GHz and performance will be poor. One trick to get round this is to try to find some old 802.11a kit that works on the 5 GHz spectrum and is less vulnerable to interference from other people's routers. Another is to use a 'stumbler' to see exactly who else is near your house, and choose a different 'channel' to them in your base station settings (1 to 13 in mine).
cyberface said:
For ultimate performance on wireless, Atheros is NOT the way to go and sadly that eliminates Macs from the game.
:nod: Big issue on my Samsung too, the Atheros driver causes CPU spikes and general network grief. Despite Atheros releasing updates every so often, it is still rubbish. So much so that I have had the thing in bits to replace it with a nice Novatel Wlan/HSDPA card. And I broke it in the process ! That is how bad the Atheros is cyberface said:
Plasticpig is on the money - match the base station / router manufacturer chipset with the laptop card manufacturer. And beware of companies like Belkin who will call a particular device the same model number (e.g. F5D5070) but it's pure luck whose chipset you get in the box, and only one of them has drivers for your OS
In reality it's close to impossible to ensure you'll get the same manufacturer's chipset in both the base station and the laptop - they change every 5 mins, and the base stations are often made by ODM's in Taiwan. The brand name on the front is little more than a marketing organisation these days. Even if it was the same manufacturer, it could easily be different generations of chipset, and base station and laptop chips aren't usually the same chipset anyway.Atheros do have "thin" chipsets where the host does a lot of the work, but they also have "fat" chipsets which have their own onboard cpu. It's the laptop manufacturers choice to use the cheapest. They very extensively test these things - the last thing someone like Apple wants is a million support calls. We've been trying Macs at work - Apple thinks we are a potential corporate account - and no wireless issues have been commented on.
Deva Link said:
cyberface said:
Plasticpig is on the money - match the base station / router manufacturer chipset with the laptop card manufacturer. And beware of companies like Belkin who will call a particular device the same model number (e.g. F5D5070) but it's pure luck whose chipset you get in the box, and only one of them has drivers for your OS
In reality it's close to impossible to ensure you'll get the same manufacturer's chipset in both the base station and the laptop - they change every 5 mins, and the base stations are often made by ODM's in Taiwan. The brand name on the front is little more than a marketing organisation these days. Even if it was the same manufacturer, it could easily be different generations of chipset, and base station and laptop chips aren't usually the same chipset anyway.Atheros do have "thin" chipsets where the host does a lot of the work, but they also have "fat" chipsets which have their own onboard cpu. It's the laptop manufacturers choice to use the cheapest. They very extensively test these things - the last thing someone like Apple wants is a million support calls. We've been trying Macs at work - Apple thinks we are a potential corporate account - and no wireless issues have been commented on.
Back to Apple - there have been a LOT of people with wireless dropouts and extremely slow network performance (basically lots of dropped packets) - I'm not making this up. It was a Tiger Atheros driver issue, I'm not sure if it's been solved in Leopard. Some dual-booting devilspawn found out that his Macbook worked perfectly over wireless when booted into Windows (obviously using Windows drivers) but was virtually unusable intermittently in OS X. And I've had my Macbook work very badly in certain revisions of Tiger on wireless networks. Apple *have* had a million support calls over this issue.... good to hear that you're not having any trouble though.
cyberface said:
It was a Tiger Atheros driver issue, I'm not sure if it's been solved in Leopard. Some dual-booting devilspawn found out that his Macbook worked perfectly over wireless when booted into Windows (obviously using Windows drivers) but was virtually unusable intermittently in OS X.
Not entirely sure that words like 'devilspawn' are helping lift the tone in here... 
The problem isn't solved in Leopard in my case, on a MacBook Pro. It's fine if you've got a great signal and you're not hammering the connection. The further away from the base station you get, the less throughput it seems able to sustain. For me there's little difference between using OSX or Vista, they're as bad as each other - much worse than the Intel chipset in my Vaio is under either XP or Vista.
It's a shame, it's the only real complaint I've got about it.
Laptop manufacturers are w
rs, like mobile phone manufacturers. They are completely obsessed with reducing size to the point that they become blind to the fact that they're making it so small it doesn't flaming work properly. There's no point having something small enough to fit down your underpants if the battery lasts 5 minutes and the keyboard is shite.
And while I'm at it, why are they also obsessed with making the resolution of the screen so pointlessly fine, with the result that either everything's chunky and fuzzy at lower-than-native res, or just too bloody small to read properly?
Sarah, does NTL's DNS also have problems with TTL?
rs, like mobile phone manufacturers. They are completely obsessed with reducing size to the point that they become blind to the fact that they're making it so small it doesn't flaming work properly. There's no point having something small enough to fit down your underpants if the battery lasts 5 minutes and the keyboard is shite.And while I'm at it, why are they also obsessed with making the resolution of the screen so pointlessly fine, with the result that either everything's chunky and fuzzy at lower-than-native res, or just too bloody small to read properly?
Sarah, does NTL's DNS also have problems with TTL?
jamieboy said:
cyberface said:
It was a Tiger Atheros driver issue, I'm not sure if it's been solved in Leopard. Some dual-booting devilspawn found out that his Macbook worked perfectly over wireless when booted into Windows (obviously using Windows drivers) but was virtually unusable intermittently in OS X.
Not entirely sure that words like 'devilspawn' are helping lift the tone in here... The problem isn't solved in Leopard in my case, on a MacBook Pro. It's fine if you've got a great signal and you're not hammering the connection. The further away from the base station you get, the less throughput it seems able to sustain. For me there's little difference between using OSX or Vista, they're as bad as each other - much worse than the Intel chipset in my Vaio is under either XP or Vista.
It's a shame, it's the only real complaint I've got about it.
I haven't upgraded any of my laptops to Leopard because of the aggro upgrading my workstation caused. It's bad to hear that Leopard drivers haven't solved the Atheros problem
Do you get perfect performance in Windows then, or are you getting bad performance in Windows as well? Some of the guys trying to diagnose this found that the wireless worked in Windows but not OS X. If it's still duff in Windows then that would point to hardware, if it's duff in just OS X then it points to duff Apple drivers.
Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff