Ranger Archive

Wireless networks are prone to hijacking and can be hacked into with ease unless you have encoding.

Go sit outside a Starbucks with a laptop with a WiFi card and you will see what I mean.

I go hardwired when possible. Bu then I was a cable tech for a year and can run wire in my sleep. The big thing to remember on any network - The slowest card sets the speed of the entire network.

JB

As for the network, you will be fine for most internet applications with a wireless card running through USB 1. If you look at the bandwidth usage of SWG, it is something well under 100KB per second (when I see 10 I know that SWG is transmitting a lot of data) which is easily handled by a wireless card. Latency is also not likely to be too huge an issue (you should still get decent ping times and the ground portion of SWG is not hugely dependent on ping times). Wired will give better performance, as will wireless through PCI, but wireless through USB should work fine for SWG. I'd be surprised if most people noticed a huge difference in their game play (except maybe in space, as twitch gameplay is a lot more succeptible to lag/bandwidth problems). Faster solutions are better but it's really up to you to decide how much performance you are willing to give up for convenience.

With the TV, there are lots of things that might be going wrong. In theory, if you plug the computer into a standard monitor and see SWG running and then plug the same cable into the plasma TV without changing any settings, the plasma screen should also show SWG if it can show your desktop. Your computer is unlikely to treat the plasma screen significantly differently than a monitor if you are using a standard monitor cable.

Some tests that might provide useful diagnostic information:

What happens when you run SWG with no extra monitors plugged in? What happens when you run SWG with a normal monitor plugged in? What happens when you start up SWG with the plasma screen plugged in? What happens when you start SWG with one other monitor option and then change to a different monitor option? Does the actual program start but then crash? Does it start and stay running in the background? You can check if the program is running by hitting ctrl-alt-delete, selecting task manager, and looking in the process tab for something like swgClient.exe (I forget the exact name). Also, are you limited in running any other applications? Can you watch a DVD or some avi/mpeg file on the plasma? Can you run something like minesweeper on there? Can you run any other games on there (2D and 3D)? Can you run any 3D programs at all? Try running (through the start menu run option) "dxdiag". There should be some tests in there that can check if your system is handling DirectX properly (the graphics tab in there is probably the most relevant).

Oh yeah, one simple thing you might want to try that works surprisingly often with problems similar to your plasma screen one:

Reboot your computer with the plasma screen plugged in and configured as your only monitor.

USB 1.1 has a datarate of 12 megabits, not megabytes, per second. You're not guaranteed to get full throughput either (not that a 802.3b network card would get more than 8-ish) so it is too slow for an 802.11g card.

USB can be spotty at times depending on the OS and age of the machine, which I can't examine and really wasn't interested in getting that in-depth into a recommendation, so it doesn't have the reliability I would want for my network card. (For a backup harddrive or whatnot it's fine.) Going wireless already adds a point of failure, so just to avoid the possibility of further complications, I say go internal.

It's not a huge deal, and he might be okay with USB, but if I had the option for my own machine I would choose PCI over USB. (And wired over wireless.) He'll probably be okay with whatever he goes with, but I make recommendations as if I were doing them for myself. The people then need to decide if their situation warrents chaanging that to suit their own needs.

Ah ha! Thanks for the clarification.

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Calculus_Entropy wrote:
That's a big fear of mine, Ken. I don't want to spend (any) money on setting this up, only to have it stink. I do know the background looked good when i get it onto the PD, so I hope it works out ok. I do know that the max res I could get the TV to display at (set up through the video card) was 1024x768, which is what i run the game at...still, it remains to be seen what the game will actually run at.

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Sounds like the screen res of the TV should be OK and if the display can pick up (or be told) that its a signal from a 'puter, you should be laughing. In which case of course I will hate you and wish bad things on your leexard head...

Don't you have any techy friends you could borrow the gear off of for a few days, yah know, just to check....

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Almagill wrote:

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Calculus_Entropy wrote:
That's a big fear of mine, Ken. I don't want to spend (any) money on setting this up, only to have it stink. I do know the background looked good when i get it onto the PD, so I hope it works out ok. I do know that the max res I could get the TV to display at (set up through the video card) was 1024x768, which is what i run the game at...still, it remains to be seen what the game will actually run at.

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Sounds like the screen res of the TV should be OK and if the display can pick up (or be told) that its a signal from a 'puter, you should be laughing. In which case of course I will hate you and wish bad things on your leexard head...

Don't you have any techy friends you could borrow the gear off of for a few days, yah know, just to check....

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I live in Wyoming...I AM the techy guy!

On wireless: Pretty much been said by all those that have gone before, but I'll toss in my 2d worth. I run a 54g wireless box off the back of my main PC. That handles the encryption side of things for me and all the wireless cards on the network are identified by their MAC numbers (or whatever the long serial numbery thingy is called... )

That lets me run the laptop pretty much anywhere in the house and within about a 25m radius of the building. Saved me having a trailing LAN cable when I was writing up my thesis and would spend an hour or so at the desk, then some time inthe big comfy chair, then go hide inthe shed for peace and quiet... and, yup, was more than capable of handling SWG up until about JtL time when it just got too big and fat and bloaty... (Still handy for playing FPS against the sprog tho).

As for running SWG on the telly... dunno what the definition on your plasma hooberyjoobery is like, but on a conventional TV [PAL not NTSC] it looks horrible. I can run a fly lead out from either the laptop, for tormenting the family with holiday snaps, or my games machine, for winding up The Boss by pushing games to the TV and using a wireless KB/mouse to play... Text tends to end up too fuzzy to read and the screen res defaults down to something like 640x480, which is known, technically, as YUCKY.

Brother has run both the PC and an X-Box through a projector and there's similar resolution issues there, despite TV progs looking okay. /shruggage

That's a big fear of mine, Ken. I don't want to spend (any) money on setting this up, only to have it stink. I do know the background looked good when i get it onto the PD, so I hope it works out ok. I do know that the max res I could get the TV to display at (set up through the video card) was 1024x768, which is what i run the game at...still, it remains to be seen what the game will actually run at.

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Calculus_Entropy wrote:

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Almagill wrote:

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Calculus_Entropy wrote:
That's a big fear of mine, Ken. I don't want to spend (any) money on setting this up, only to have it stink. I do know the background looked good when i get it onto the PD, so I hope it works out ok. I do know that the max res I could get the TV to display at (set up through the video card) was 1024x768, which is what i run the game at...still, it remains to be seen what the game will actually run at.

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Sounds like the screen res of the TV should be OK and if the display can pick up (or be told) that its a signal from a 'puter, you should be laughing. In which case of course I will hate you and wish bad things on your leexard head...

Don't you have any techy friends you could borrow the gear off of for a few days, yah know, just to check....

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I live in Wyoming...I AM the techy guy!

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ROFL

nuff said

i would say - ask Doc.

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Vorpaks wrote:
i would say - ask Doc.

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The bum isn't around anymore!