Basic Wireless Questions

**chopsuey** · 06-08-2004, 11:50 AM

It will be a while before I have my carputer put together and functioning but I was curious about a few things. I will eventually have wireless on my carputer and will connect to my access point in my apartment(hopefully) when I am in the parking lot. I know this depends on what area you are driving in but do you guys find a lot of open access points when you are driving around? Do you decide that you want to check your email and stop and connect to some else's open access point? Do you have something setup so that your carputer will connect to any open access point? I guess I am just curious how useful the wireless is when you are not in range of your home access point.

**TLSPRWR** · 06-08-2004, 12:10 PM

No carputer for me yet, but I have driven around on roadtrips with my dad's laptop for about 8 hours with a decent wireless card, no extra antenna. When actually driving (in decent sized cities), you tend to hit a point, and almost instantly get out of it. 802.11x generally didn't do well while we were moving. Usually it was hard to figure out where the spot was. The card's drivers (or maybe it's XP, dunno) had an Icon that popped up and turned green whenever there was a connection. But sometimes IE lagged behind on some stuff (using cached pages instead of updating while you were in the spot) and so it generally didn't work well.

Now for areas very densely populated, it might be a little easier, but for me, it didn't work to well.