Desktop wireless card, advice please

NOWSE

My daughter is at university and shares a house. They have a wireless network for their broadband internet. Last year my daughter used a laptop and had a slot-in network card. This year she is using her desktop and needs to get a new card. I know that the norm with a desktop is to fit a card into one of the expansion slots but I'm not sure that my daughter is confident enough with computers to do this. I'm therefore looking for an alternative. Belkin seem to do a device that plugs into a USB but a couple of sites say that it has been discontinued.

Does anyone know of an alternative to using an expansion slot card?

Darksun

There are plenty of USB Adapter models, I got one off eBuyer for about £10. Dunno if you'll find such a good offer, usually a PCI card will be cheaper, and they're really easy to fit.

Midas

There a plenty of USB wireless adapters available, I have a D-Link one which cost about £40 new, although that was quite a while ago so they could be cheaper now.

As the previous poster said, a PCI one should be cheaper, probably around £20 new.

Stabilo

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Dynamode-Wireless-USB-adapter-dongle-802-11g-New-WiFi_W0QQitemZ5813505461QQcategoryZ45002QQcmdZViewItem

less than £20 delivered. I have purchased from this (UK) trader. Their cheap USB wifi devices have generally outperformed the numerous PCMCIA (expensive)versions I have bought from elsewhere.

With USB you can use on desktops and laptops, much better than PCI.

Sput2001

Plenty of manufacturers do USB versions - I picked up a Linksys one from Amazon and it's fine. Internal PCI ones aren't that hard to fit, though.

Does the PC in question have USB 2.0 sockets?

jampton

NickMidgley wrote:

Does the PC in question have USB 2.0 sockets?

Shouldn't matter whether it's usb 1 or 2 to share a broadband connection i.e. in most cases the speed of the slowest usb socket will be greater than then speed of the broadband connection.

Sput2001

jampton wrote:

Shouldn't matter whether it's usb 1 or 2 to share a broadband connection i.e. in most cases the speed of the slowest usb socket will be greater than then speed of the broadband connection.

No, but if they're looking to share files etc. with each other then it speeds things up. As you say, it's hardly crucial, though.