Yesterday I was off work sick (one of those 48 tumors) so naturally I decided to kill off the last lot of cat5 cables from my home network. To date I’ve had mix experience with wireless technologies so it wasn’t a huge surprise to me that this migration of systems didn’t go as smoothly as possible.
Basically the idea was simple, install a 3Com OfficeConnect Wireless 11g USB Adapter (drivers available here) I had lying around the house and cut the cord on my wired network for good. So I go about installing the 3com software on my my desktop, it requests I insert my USB adapter into the USB port and sure enough windows fires up one of those little speech bubble pop ups “windows does not recognise the attached USB device” or something to that effect.
I’ve had USB issues on my desktop before so I knew it wasn’t the wireless adapter that was at fault but the rather temperamental USB controller on my GA-8SQ800 motherboard. How I ended up with an SIS chipset based motherboard is beyond me. Anyway after hours of screwing around with drivers ports and what not I tried something which seemed destined to fail but somehow work perfectly. In my closet of random computer parts I had an old USB 1 hub. I plugged this hub into the USB 2.0 port on my desktop and then plug the USB wireless adapter into the hub.
With this done my network came to life, Internet connection came online. The only draw back of this solution to my USB problem is the limited bandwidth of the USB 1 hub. At 12 Mb/s the hub performs far below the 56 Mb/s of the wireless card. However in saying that given the desktops network functions are only used for Internet access the 12 Mb/s is more than adequate to handle my DSL line.