Laptop and Networking Advice?

[SMHarman]

A lot of this has been covered before and I've even contributed to such threads...

At the moment I have a new AMD2400 desktop WXPHome and an old Celeron 333 6Gb HDD W982ndEd. Both with NIC cards. NTL 600k BB connected to the NIC of the new PC, the Old one is currently collecting dust (so to speak)

Need a laptop and plan to wirelessly connect this to the BB and also to be able to access files and printers...

My thoughts are to buy a second 80-160Gb HDD for the Celeron and use this as a file server (and to back up the HDDs of both the laptop and new desktop, also to then connect the printers to this. As it also acts as an ISDN fax machine, this will be back in action. A usefull benefit we need to reinstate at home. Due to the slower processor on this its a nice quiet machine. Will there be problems with an HDD this size (FAT32) in a W98 machine? Will partitioning help these problems? What HDDs are currently recommended?

Laptop questions.
So many processors.
Celeron, Pentium, PentiumM, Centrino, AMD, AMDM
What is recommended? Is a 1400Mhz Centrino half the speed of a Pentium 2800 or AMD 2800? Will this be noticed in Browsing, Mail, light word and Excel work?
Centrino seems to be wireless b, so would it be better to get the wirless as a PCIMICA card and get g?
I'm thinking of a dell laptop, possibly the Inspiron 5150 or 9100 (which is widescreen). Any other recommendations?

Wireless
Again Linksys or Netgear seem to be the recommended choices.
Linksys do the router with the print server, but if I'm useing the old PC as such this is not necessary. Would these be the routers of choice?

Am I missing anything (apart from a new spaghetti junction of cables when I'm done.

Thanks for any help and advice.

[SOSAGES]

looks like a good plan to me .id maybe do things different but lets go for what you wanna do ..

So this old machine is mearly going to be used for ISND and file server for your new laptop and xphoem box, oh and to back them up.. FAT32 does have issues with larger drives depends what size you want ( bios and chipset need to support 48 bit adressing to break the 137 gig barrier)..also i imagine as its an old 333 celeron that it wont be very fast for a file server as the speed of the drive wont be able to run to its max potential as it will probably be using an older UDMA standard, so bear that in mind. anyway .. you would need a silent hard drive for your new pc check out the samsung spinpoint series.

laptop - depends what u want i would go for a centrino you wont need super power to do what u listed. cant recomend one id go read some reviews

id go for either netgear or linksys both as good (or as bad) as each other ..id also get one with a print server in it incase your 333 dies..


have you considered
1. getting an external firewire/usb2 hard drive for file server attached to main pc
2. using print server router for printing
3. using isdn on winxp main pc.
4. installing DVD writter for backups of data from laptop and mainpc..

[erol]

You may well have a 133GB hd drive limit on the old PC. This will depend on your motherboard and not the OS I believe, but it may depend on both. Partitioning will not help get over this limit. What mb do you have ?

centrino 1.4 is about 1/2 the speed of pentium4 2.8 (or AMD) but will give about twice the battery life (and less noise and heat). I doubt you would notice much difference in speed in 'normal' apps like web,email excell etc. You would notice it if you were converting an mpeg2 file to divx or similar heavy CPU intensive app. Have a look at www.tomshardware.com for comparisions of various mobile chip options.

HTH

[Indians]

My personal preference is for Netgear stuff, and would probably go for their wireless router (they have one with print server as well) , you can use the old PC as a 'fileserver' but would still need a second NIC and would still need a wireless connection either a Wireless Access Point or the wireless router, so go with the router.
Can't see any problems with W98 and HDD size, personally I would partition it anyway.
I've got 2 Dell Laptops, a SmartPC250N, and a Inspiron 8500 Widescreen (superb), go to Dell's support forums to get a feel for any probs with them here...http://forums.us.dell.com/supportfor...ry.id=inspiron Don't forget you can go through here...http://www.couponmountain.co.uk/ you'll get some discount, £50 at the mo but can be up to £100, they're Dell affiliates, so you just need to connect to the Dell site through them and the discount is taken off automatically.
As for wireless, you can get the wireless 'built in' to the Dell Laptops, they use mini pci cards inside and the antena is built in round the screen, I decided not to do that and went for a Netgear 'g' PCMCIA card, obviously sticks out the side but more flexible in long run IMO.

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by SOSAGES

<snip>

have you considered
1. getting an external firewire/usb2 hard drive for file server attached to main pc
2. using print server router for printing
3. using isdn on winxp main pc.
4. installing DVD writter for backups of data from laptop and mainpc..

Yes, but this would mean leaving a fairly noise y PC on more of the time.
Yes- One of the routers I was looking at has one built in, but as we have a laserjet and injet printer, this means two printservers. I can always bolt these on later. Netgear certainly do them to integrate with their routers
Yes - again leaving it on full time / noise / heat.
Yes - I've got one, but backing up my 33Gb of iTunes AACs is a tedious task, and thats just part of the 160Gb of HDD on the main PC.

[SMHarman]

Ram upgrades

512MB 333 MHz DDR SDRAM (2x256) (+£80)
512MB 333MHz DDR SDRAM (1x512) (+£140)

Is the latter worthwhile?

[Adam G]

Originally Posted by SMHarman

Ram upgrades

512MB 333 MHz DDR SDRAM (2x256) (+£80)
512MB 333MHz DDR SDRAM (1x512) (+£140)

Is the latter worthwhile?

no mate those DDR prices are wayyyyyy to expensive - check out the web for better prices than that - pc world will give you better prices than that - an thats saying something.!!!

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by Adam G

no mate those DDR prices are wayyyyyy to expensive - check out the web for better prices than that - pc world will give you better prices than that - an thats saying something.!!!

Thanks I'll buy with the minimum RAM and upgrade separately then.

[MovedGoalPosts]

Originally Posted by SMHarman

Thanks I'll buy with the minimum RAM and upgrade separately then.

One of the best places, and good pricing, I've found for RAM is www.crucial.com/uk

Memory delivered special delivery post next day (if you order early enough) with no P&P added to price.

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by Indians

As for wireless, you can get the wireless 'built in' to the Dell Laptops, they use mini pci cards inside and the antena is built in round the screen, I decided not to do that and went for a Netgear 'g' PCMCIA card, obviously sticks out the side but more flexible in long run IMO.

Looks like the 8600 and 9100 only do built in (thats progress). So will pay the extra for the a/b/g buildin.

Saw the netgear one with
http://www.netgear.com/products/details/FM114P.php
only supports one printer - hmm
http://www.netgear.com/products/prod...rodID=60&view=
This would plug into a non print server one and cover both printers though.

Originally Posted by SOSAGES

looks like a good plan to me .id maybe do things different but lets go for what you wanna do ..

So this old machine is mearly going to be used for ISND and file server for your new laptop and xphoem box, oh and to back them up.. FAT32 does have issues with larger drives depends what size you want ( bios and chipset need to support 48 bit adressing to break the 137 gig barrier)..also i imagine as its an old 333 celeron that it wont be very fast for a file server as the speed of the drive wont be able to run to its max potential as it will probably be using an older UDMA standard, so bear that in mind. anyway .. you would need a silent hard drive for your new pc check out the samsung spinpoint series.

laptop - depends what u want i would go for a centrino you wont need super power to do what u listed. cant recomend one id go read some reviews

How would you do it differently, just so I can consder my options.

I'll find out about the BIOS / Chipset tonight. It's a Gateway machine, but thats about as much use as saying its a red car.

Speedwise as this is more for backup, sharing the iTunes DB etc as long as it runs at a speed fast enough to keep up with the wireless then it should not be a problem.

Disk intensive / graphics intensive stuff will be kept on the main PCs RAID0.

Centrino is seems to be.

[SOSAGES]

*edit*

how would i do it?
i have 2 pc's both pretty silent ..i know what its like to have a noisey one and i hated it ... your 333 is my only concern about the whole master plan .. you seem to have some cash to spend so why not get your self a cheap p4 mobo + p4 with just 2 hard drives in the box (or how ever many)you wont need any more fans .. i have 2 such systems i cant hear them nor do they run hot ...you could also use any size hard drive and taht would be a bonus as u willalways be getting more tunes + movies etc ..it could maybe one day be the center of all things media related in your house ..divx movies on the tv etc

id also maybe look at getting a very small case (shuttle sort of thing) and just chucking it in a cupboard somewhere but you seem to need a few conectors for isdn etc or maybe u need to configure it ....oh get xp pro on it and use the remote desktop software that will be handy for you .

[SMHarman]

Bump, anyone posting this PM care to add to this?

[dragon]

a celeron in a p4 would prob do ok for the server and its a lot cheaper. or for a little bit more than a celeron get an althon if u want a faster server


i must admit i only read the thread over quickly so prob missed some bits


as for the laptop speed depends on what u do with it im currently using a p3 800 laptop to type this post and its fast enought for surfing and bussiess apps.

i have a 2500+ althon desktop which i upgraded to form a 1.8ghz p4 chip and even though its only 8.5ghz clock speed it does actaully perform a lot better than my 1.8 p4 chip did

(main reason i upgraded is the mobo on the p4 wasnt mine and didnt have 8x agp.)


as for pc noise i find u tend to learn to ignore it after a while.

[SMHarman]

Well after a frustrating time trying to get the HDD to be discovered in the old PC, the answer Maxtor require you remove all jumpers for it to be a slave (or Politically correct Secondary) device, otherwise it is Primary or Cable select. It came shipped as Cable Select. Pulled that out, as gateways online techs had confirmed the PC supports 136Gb and off it went. Maxtors support software is fantastic. I was going to order the Samsung spinpoint as recommended above but somehow clicked and bought the Maxtor. Seems pretty quite.

Discovered why the old PC is so quite, the only fan is the power supply one, it blows on a big metal heatsink on the processor, so quiet.

Router - I got the Linksys WRT52G (version 1.1 was shipped with most recent firmware). Plug and Play... Powered everything off plugged it all in powered up in order and away it went.

Next problem was the XP machine (and the w98) refusing to see each other in the OS. The would ping etc. Searched for the PC and it found it. Currently backing up lots of data, cool.

Questions I have left at the moment.

The router has NAT and Firewall. So can I disable the firewalls on the machines behind it. They are at the moment, so they can see and talk to one another. AV is still running on the XP machine. None loaded on the W98 machine at the mo. If it is not browsing or e-mailing does it need one? I could even use the router to block it from the internet i suppose? Thoughts?

Is there some software I could run on the clients or file store to sweep for new/modified files in certain folders, say MyDocuments and copy them onto the backup drive?

Thanks all for your help. The warm backup will be fantastic in helping me sleep at night as all Mrs Hs clients in progress accounting invoicing etc are now backed up.

[dragon]

hmm... i dunno about disableing the firewalls i leave mine up even though im behind a router.

have u tryed my briefcase in win98 for swapping the files i belive it can monitor changes across to folders and syncroncise with another location

i think xp has something simular called offline files where it keeps a copy of any files on a network drive for when it gets disconnected.

i prefer to run antivirus on all my machines just in case, although if you dont want to payout for another one put something like antivir (www.free-av.com) or avast32 (www.avast.com) its better than nothing and last time i checked those were both free.