We should be getting high speed internet in a few months and I was wanting to know how many KB are in a Gb, and about how fast is normal cable internet. And one more thing what all do I need to set up a wireless home network, and about how much sould it cost?
Thanks for all the help.

 

there are a lot of Kilobytes in a Gigabyte. did you know that you can use google as a caclulator? go to www.google.com and type in "kilobytes in a gigabyte" without the quotation marks. here is a calculator for conversions. here is a page with some more information to confuse you. this stuff can get really confusing, so don't feel bad if you have to read over it a couple of times.

the wireless network cost depends on what equipment you have and what you need. you need a wireless access point or router and a wireless nic for each computer. the router/access point prices vary widely. they start around $50 for a linksys and run as high as your budget allows. i have a netgear and am happy with it. i had to do a firmware upgrade though. it kept dropping connectivity when i had encryption enabled. i had a linksys but my phone and baby monitor kept interfering with it, no matter what channel i put it on. the wireless network cards run between $50 and $100 for a desktop computer.

if you do a wireless network, follow some basic security guidelines. enable some type of encryption; the stonger the better. enable MAC filtering to prevent people from using your network. disable the SSID broadcast. this helps keep people from even seeing that you have a wireless network. and don't forget to change the default password of your router. if you do these things, you seriously reduce your chances of getting hacked into.

the speed of cable internet can vary depending on several variables. cable modems are subject to saturation. this means the more people you have on your segment, the slower it can be. some companies put measures into place to help this, but not all do. that said, the download speed, meaning how fast you can pull information down to you, can be extremely fast on cable modems. the upload speed isn't nearly as fast, but most people don't need that extra speed.

keep your anti-virus software up to date. buy it if you don't already have it. most anti-virus software expires after 1 year, so you'll have to purchase an new license then. people tend to start downloading more stuff when they get a fast connection, therefore increasing their chances of getting a virus. download some spyware removal software. spybot and ad-aware are two good ones i use. spybot finds more stuff but isn't as intuitive as ad-aware. keep those up to date as well.

hope this helps.

 

Hey thanks for the help, we live in a very rural area so I don't know how necicary a very intricit firewall and encription would be, it probably would not hurt though, the network would only be for 2 computer in our house one is a desktop and mine is a laptop so I was hoping to have all the equipment next to the desktop and have one of those USB antanas for the desktop and have a wireless card for my laptop. I have spybot and it works good, I used to have Norton anti-virus but it has expired and now AVG 6.0 it is free so you can't beat that, I can't wait till we get it cause I am tired of waiting 30 min. for 4.5mb to download, expecialy scince I like to download alot of videos. Are you sure that the walls in your house is not a reason for the loss of conection? It is the first form of highspeed internet in our area so I hope that it is reliable, we have highspeed at our school and it is not very reliable but wow is it very fast compared to dial up, I got a 33MB video there in about 45 min, is this slow? I know that the same video here would have taken about 6 hours, so if is about that fast I will be very pleased. Thanks for the help.

 

33 mb in 45 mins...yeah that is pretty slow...I can get that in about 3 mins depending on what site I am on...and if you are just connecting the two, if you get say like a linksys it has cat-5 jacks in the back so you do not need to purchase a seperate wireless card for you desktop...and does your desktop have an ethernet card already installed in it? if not you are going too need to buy one of them...

ohh and also when you go and buy the wireless router or hub (which ever way you decide to go) 802.11b should be just fine...I dont see ne reason why you would need 802.11g but most of the routers and wireless cards handle both... good luck in setting it up!

 

How fast is the satelite internet? I was thinking about getting that. Compaired to regular cable internet I meant. I have dial-up right now and the max speed is 24.00 kps. I should have a wind-up **** on the side of my monitor.

 

i dont recommend satellite due to the weather may cause you to be bored while it is cloudy/raining outside(no signal)

cable is usually faster than dsl

I dont recommend aol, probably the slowest dsl provider