Wireless Card or USB?

[moondoggy23]

So, I'm thinking about buying either a new wireless card for my desktop, or a wireless USB adapter. I want a N-range connection to match my router, but I'm not sure which would be more beneficial? I know with the wireless USB adapter, I can connect more than one device if I needed, but I don't need to. Is that basically the only difference between the two?

Right now I have a wireles G card in my desktop.

 

[Wooty]

"I know with the wireless USB adapter, I can connect more than one device if I needed, but I don't need to."

I'm not really sure what this means -- you can only connect a usb adapter to a single device at a time.

Regardless, I would recommend USB anyways. The only real benefits are:
- It doesn't tie up a PCI or PCI express slot, which may or may not be used by other devices
- You can easily move it to a different computer if you need to for some reason
- USB 2.0 bandwidth is much higher than 802.11N bandwidth, so it's not like an internal card would be any faster

 

[moondoggy23]

Thanks Sonic!

 

[Godliberator]

exactly what woot said, I suggest you go with USB, however know that just because it says wireless N, does not mean that is what you will get, because if there is a single device on your network running at under N speed, in most cases it will throttle your network speed down to match the device that is not N rated. this is not always the case, however I have seen this happen a whole lot.

 

[GiftedNarwhals]

Get a power line adapter. it makes your power lines one big Ethernet wire and works like a charm. can hold my 20mb/s download speed with ease and go all the way up to 200mb/s if u pay that much for Internet. its price is around 100$ and even tho its a bit steep i highly recommend it. i used to use a usb wireless connector and had lag issues all the time.