L305D upgrading to wireless N - Need some advice

I have a Satellite L305D with an Atheros AR5007G card currently installed, and I want to upgrade to a 300mbps card. While searching for pictures of what card is in it, I came up with two completely different types of card, although both claim to be Mini-PCI.

First question: Which of these cards is actually the card I have in my laptop? (I haven't taken it apart to find out yet... too many other projects going on at the moment. )



Or..



Second question: Does anyone have any recommendations on which cards would work good for me? I looked at the Atheros AR5008n, but in the specs, it says it only supports up to 100mbps.


Thanks in advance.

Ah, ok... The first is pciE, and the second is PCI? That is easy enough.

I've been looking at several cards recently. I have absolutely no problem with buying a card for $30 +/- right now, only to turn around and buy another one later on this year. I wouldn't want to go out and spend big bucks on a card if they are going to have N finalized soon, though. Still... I use my laptop for way too many things, and 54mbps just isn't cutting it, so I am still open to suggestions about a new card to get me through until N is finished.

Yeah, no worries there. My router is N, and 90% of the time, I am less than 50' from it with my laptop. We don't live near anyone else with wireless internet that can be picked up from my house, so interference is minimal (if it exists).

The laptops main use is streaming video and audio as well as transferring large files from my desktop, which is set up for 1000mbps transfer, so it is annoying to see my transfers lobbing along at 2.5 MB/s.

And yeah, I am too impatient to wait for something better. haha.

We have 5 laptops in the house, and they all vary, but there is only one laptop which is actually slower than mine.

Most of them are actually running Windows 7 RC, but there are two that are still running vista. I just recently jumped from Vista to Windows 7 on the Toshiba, and the speeds are the same for both operating systems. The drivers are all up to date.

If my math is correct, the transfer should be between 5 and 7 MB/s, so it is just under half what it is capable of.

The Router was purchased brand new just about 8 months ago.

Firewall: Windows. (also tried it disabled.)

Antivirus: Avast

Browser: Firefox 3.0.10, although that wouldn't matter during pc to pc transfer.

Yes sir! 2.5MB/s is enough to keep up with my 7.8mbps (950KB/s-1MB/s) internet speed. The primary problem is PC to PC transfers for streaming media and transferring of large files.

If I can get 2.5MB/s transfer pc to pc and my internet is capped at 950-1mb, then how do you figure it would be faster to upload from one computer at 350kb/s (my max upload), and then download at 950kb/s rather than going directly from PC to PC at 2.5? Also, if I can get a wireless N that allows even up to 10mb/s transfer, and my wired computers will transfer from one to the next at nearly 80mb/s, then how do you feel upgrading my card won't help?

I am a bit fuzzy on that.

Still -

Transfer from Desktop to Laptop: 2.5 Megabytes per second.

Download from the internet via Laptop: 950 Kilobytes per second.

Upload speed from any PC in the house: 350 Kilobytes per second.


Now let's look at the numbers mathematically.


50 Megabyte file.

@ 2.5 Megabytes per second via PC to PC -

20 seconds.


@ 350 Kilobytes per second upload from Desktop, download @ 950 Kilobytes per second via internet.

2m 38s upstream
0m 53s downstream

Total: 3m 31s

That is 3m 31s to transfer via internet vs 20 seconds to transfer direct.


Now, most people say their 300mbps cards see an average speed of around 20 Megabytes per second while transferring from one PC to another. At that speed, my transfer time would be 2.5 seconds.


So here is what we have:

via Internet: 3m 31s
via 54mbps: 0m 20s
via 300mbps: 0m 2.5s


Now with the math out of the way by using a 50MB file as an example, let's apply that to a real world (read: my) situation.

One of my desktop PCs is used for video editing. I write, film, and edit movies as a hobby with my friends. The finished product of these files is usually an MPEG2 video which ranges in size from 5GB up to as much as 20GB.

My laptop is hooked up to a Projector downstairs so we can view the movies when we are done. Streaming the movies is not physically possible at the moment due to my slow connection with my laptop, so the only way to get movies onto the laptop is a USB flash drive, which will only transfer at an average of about 7-8MB/s. This means that, if I were to see the same results as others using 300mbps cards, I could effectively double the speed of the USB drive and multiply my current wireless speed by nearly ten times.

This isn't even taking into account the fact that every time I have to wipe my hard drive and reinstall an operating system, one of the first things I have to do is transfer more than 60GB worth of MP3s from my iTunes on my desktop to my iTunes on my laptop. (Which I have done 4 times in the past two weeks.)

Right now, when I have to transfer my music, I am using an Ethernet cable to connect to my router, which nets me a speed of 10MB/s, limited by the onboard 10/100 Ethernet on my laptop. (My entire home network is set up for 10/100/1000, remember).

I also keep backups of the free/open source programs I use so I don't have to download them every time I reformat my HD. (2.5MB/s > 950KB/s). These account for another 10GB easily worth of data that needs to be transferred every time I reformat.



So, as I have said... I am quite fuzzy on how you have concluded that:

1) Transfer via Internet will be faster than PC to PC.
2) Upgrading to a 300mbps card will not benefit me.


Is there something else you are telling me that I am missing?

I know that you have mentioned Cables being a possibility in the bottleneck, but like I've said... all of the desktops on my network are set up for gigabit, so my PC to PC transfers between other computers is usually between 80 and 85MB/s. I seriously doubt that would be a bottleneck. I also know my router is set up for 300mbps Wireless N, so that wouldn't be a bottleneck if I upgraded.

If I was only using the PC for internet, there wouldn't be an issue at all, because my transfer rate on the laptop is more than double our maximum internet speed... but I actually don't use my laptop for internet or browsing very often at all.

So, this is a very old post... but I finally got around to buying a Mini-PCI card. it came today, so I pulled the keyboard out... It is a Mini-PCIe that I needed. I should've looked before I bought a card.