ceejay Wrote: 
> We've had lots of discussions on the maturity or otherwise of wireless
> networking generally: and one of the comments that is often made by
> people who are struggling to get their SBs working wirelessly is "but
> my laptops / PDA / whatever have always worked first time" (implication
> - therefore the SB itself must be the problem).
> 
> I had sight, recently, of customer satisfaction data from a major PC
> manufacturer (best to remain nameless!) and in particular there was a
> table of "reasons for dissatisfaction" - in other words, if you were
> dissatisfied, what was the reason?  And for laptops, by a significant
> margin, the main reason was "couldn't get wireless networking to
> work".
> 
> So its not just the SBs that struggle...

Yes, that's for sure.

Several other thoughts on this:

- a PC and an SB do very different things (general access versus
streaming audio).  If you try wireless streaming with a PC that seems
to work fine otherwise, you may be surprised at its poor performance. 
I cannot get foobar2000 on my wireless laptop to reliably play FLAC
files stored on my server - I get dropouts and stuttering.  The SB does
the same thing without issue.

- a comparable activity, downloading a large file over the WLAN, isn't
really the same at all.  If wireless conditions degrade, the download
slows down without consequence because it's all spooling into a partial
download file.

- a PC has much greater resources than an SB does, which allows for
sophisticated connectivity software that masks problems.  This software
isn't perfect either, just ask anyone using Windows XP wireless zero
config with their wireless NIC's software simultaneously.

- a PC's wireless settings are extremely adjustable while a lot of the
adjustable parameters in a PC are fixed in the SB firmware.  Go to the
advanced properties of your wireless NIC and you'll see what I mean.


-- 
Mark Lanctot
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=16523

_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss

Reply via email to