Wireless Cards for a Laptop

[Livenomadic]

I've been in wanted to get some writing done outside my apartment for a while now. So I decided to take advantage of my universities free wireless internet access and do some work by a pool or something.

Now, not being a genius I really don't know the difference between all the thousands of wireless cards avaliable. All I know is that it needs to be 32bit PCMIA and the university wirelss network is 802.11b

If anyone has any experience with wireless cards and wouldn't mind giving me some suggestions about good cards I would be most appreciative.

Thanks!

[anallawalla]

Get one with 802.11g, which is a faster speed and usually also handles the slower 11b. Some propietary systems let you double it to 108 Mbit/s if the access point is the same (recent) brand. These days, the well known brands are all compatible with one another. For outdoor use, you may want one with a fold-up antenna or one that has an antenna socket.

If you want to dabble in "Stumbling" (finding new hotspots), you may want to see which cards are compatible with stumbler software. In my case, my older Cisco and Enterasys cards are compatible but a newer 11g card is not. But I use the newer card for its speed, not the dubious thrill of stumbling.