I’ve been waiting for prices to drop on the dual-band wireless routers and today the price was right for a Vizio XWR100 Dual-Band HD Video and Wireless Internet Router. At Sams Club it was selling for US$69.98, which was less than half the price of the Cisco 3000 I had been eyeballing. Granted the XWR100 has 4-10/100MB ports, whereas the 3000 has 10/100/1000MB ports, but then I have a separate managed Gigabit switch for my servers. I’ll keep the old WRT54G with DD-WRT for a spare and test this Vizio unit at home for a bit. Setup was brainless, the unit only comes with a power adapter, a 1.5′ Ethernet cable, and a two page setup guide, which is mostly pictures anyway. It has a USB 2.0 port for external storage that I have yet to test. Time will tell how this device performs, but for the price I couldn’t leave the store without one.
UPDATE_20101203: So far, so good. The routers USB port works and presents an external hard drive as a share. Connectivity to the connected hard drive isn’t as fast as to my server, but it would work as a central storage location for a small network. The 5.8GHz network is being used for streaming video from my server to a couple rooms and that is also working fine, whereas before a room to room video stream was disrupted when an internet download was started. Overall, I’m happy with this router and feel that it was a good purchase.
Looks like the DualAdapter is going back. With no fix reported for the near future, I’m getting this product back to the vendor while I can. Too bad, it was much less expensive to buy this adapter than a laptop with a PCMCIA slot. Oh well, another laptop dedicated to testing is not so bad either.
This DuelAdapter PCMCIA to ExpressCard adapter is not working with my HP notebook and 32-bit PCMCIA cards. The Windows XP SP2 system event log entry is “The device “Generic CardBus Controller” has detected a CardBus card in its slot, but the firmware on this system is not configured to allow the CardBus controller to be run in CardBus mode. The operating system will currently accept only 16-bit (R2) pc-cards on this controller.”
Per duel-systemsadapters.com support: “This is a known firmware issue with HP/Compaq notebooks. We are in the process of getting this issue resolved as soon as we can. When a solution is available you will be able to get information on it from the http://duel-systemsadapters.com/ web site.”
I have successfully tested older 16-bit PCMCIA cards: Dell TrueMobile 1150, Orinoco Gold, Cisco 340, Linksys Ethernet. But my 32-bit cards are not recognized by the system. Time to call HP and see whats up. Stay tuned.
My DuelAdapter PCMCIA to ExpressCard adapter arrived today. I’m hoping that this will allow me to use most of my old PCMCIA cards with my new laptop, which doesn’t have a PCMCIA card slot. I was going to buy an older laptop that still had a serial port and PCMCIA card slot for testing, but then discovered this not-so-small adapter. My initial testing of a Dell TrueMobile 1150 series card is working (hacked with the Orinoco Gold firmware), but not my Ubiquiti 300mW a/b/g card. You can get the TrueMobile 1150 cards on ebay cheap. I also have a few PCMCIA LAN cards and some other PCMCIA WiFi cards to test yet. I need to see if my software tools work with this device too. Stay tuned.
MetaGeek, LLC makes a low cost Wi-Fi spectrum analyzer called the Wi-Spy. It comes in handy when troubleshooting interference problems in the 802.11 b/g/n frequency range. Sure is doesn’t have all of the features of the BumbleBee Wi-Fi Spectrum Analyzer at US$2500, and it won’t be a 802.11 wireless technicians only tool, but instead a low cost (US$200) addition to their wireless toolset. For me it has been useful for detecting microwave oven and wireless telephone interference on several wireless networks that I have troubleshooted. I also picked one up when they were still going for US$99. 
