- The Good: Excellent reception and signal strength; slick, well-made hardware; thorough instructions.
- The Bad: Pricey; software wizard for the USB adapter didn't work smoothly.
- The Verdict: It's not the cheapest WiFi hardware on the market, but it's a solid wireless package for people who want to set up a home network without stringing cables everywhere.
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- Reviewed on: Cicero (Future Shop) 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 PC with an Intel D845GERG2LK motherboard, 1GB of PC2100 DDR memory, an ATI Radeon 9800 video card with 128MB of video memory, Windows XP Home, a Maxtor 300GB SATA hard drive running at 7,200 RPM, and a KDS Rad-7c LCD panel.
- Also available for: All Windows PCs
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REVIEW:
Microsoft's hardware division, long known for mice and keyboards, expanded into wireless networking not long ago. The company started out with 802.11b hardware, and has already moved up to faster 802.11g WiFi equipment.
I checked out Microsoft's Wireless Notebook Kit, which uses 802.11g equipment. It comes with a four-port switched router featuring a firewall and a built-in wireless network access point. The package includes an 802.11g PC Card for networking a notebook computer without wires.
The Wireless Notebook Kit is top-notch, but pricey. You can get Wifi equipment for much less money from other vendors that will do basically the same thing, although the Microsoft kit does have a couple of notable performance advantages over bargain-basement gear.
The WiFi 802.11g standard specifies that products run at up to 54 Mbps, and that they're also backwards-compatible with 11 Mbps 802.11b gear. In the "real world," though, the actual data throughput is much less than the rated peak. There's overhead in terms of the information that WiFi uses to route signals, and like the distance between the transmitter and receiver as well as the amount of radio frequency interference in the area can also affect the amount of data that can get through. On a good day, you can expect to get actual file throughput of somewhere in the 45 megabits-per-second range with most WiFi systems.
This is still more than enough for sharing an Internet connection, considering broadband Internet is usually 1Mbps to 5 Mbps, depending on your service provider. Speed really only becomes a big issue when you want to start transferring files, sharing printers and streaming content such as video to a home media gateway that connects to your home stereo or theatre system. Even then, an 802.11g system is overkill for the vast majority of home users.
MN-700 Wireless Base Station
The heart of the Wireless Notebook Kit is the Wireless Base Station MN-700 (also available separately). It's basically a four-port Ethernet switched router that has a built-in wireless access point.
The manual is thorough and clearly written, a big plus for novice networkers. The base station plugs into your high-speed DSL or cable modem, and you also have to plug it into a wall socket for power. Then you run Microsoft's configuration software, which walks you through the process of setting up the base station. Setup is made easier by the fact that the router senses whether you've plugged in a crossover or patch cable, and detecting whether a wired connection is running at 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps so that it can configure its port accordingly without you having to manually change any settings.
The one problem with the wizard is that it's really made for people who already have one PC connected to their broadband modem, or who were running an Internet Connection Sharing setup through one PC that acted as a gateway. In either case, the wizard will gather all the necessary setup information from that PC and configure the MN-700 automatically. But if you have a wired local-area network connected to your broadband modem through a router, you're out of luck - the wizard will be lost, as it can't pull the necessary configuration information from a router. In that case, you'll have to plug all the settings into the router manually - not a big deal for anyone who has dabbled in local area/home networking, but if you're not comfortable with networking and had to have someone set up that wired router for you originally, you're probably going to need the same sort of help to get the MN-700 running smoothly.
Manual setup is fairly straightforward, though, thanks to the thorough manual. You replace your existing router with the MN-700, then use one of the PCs connected to the access point via the included Ethernet cable to access its on-line setup system. This is as simple as turning on the MN-700 and the PC, then launching the PC's browser and typing in an IP address number from the manual. This opens up the MN-700's setup screen, and the manual walks you through setting up things like users passwords, dynamic IP allocation, PPoE settings (for DSL modem users), 64-bit/128-bit WEP or the newer 256-bit WPA wireless security (which the Microsoft gear fully supports), and so on.
The only problem I had was that when I tried typing ASCII characters for the WEP security key, it didn't recognize them properly. I had to type in the full hexadecimal version of the key, a long series of confusing digits.
I appreciated a detailed section on using the MN-700 as a wireless access point, too. You can shut down the routing and firewall functions, and just plug it into a port on a wired router to add wireless access to an existing network. The nice part about this arrangement is that you can shut off the wireless portion of the network when you don't need it but leave the wired segment running through the original router.
Once the base station is configured, you can connect computers to its wired ports using ethernet cable. Computers, notebooks and PDAs that have 802.11b or 802.11g WiFi cards can also connect over the 802.11g connection.
The MN-700's radio power is stronger than what the average Wi-Fi base station offers. Its easily enough to cover the average home. Even though it uses a single aerial rather than the two- or three-aerial arrangements on more powerful base stations, the signal strength was excellent.
The built-in security system is top-notch for a home-based gateway, too - which is probably the single most important reason for getting a gateway/router in the first place. Always-on broadband connections are an invitation to Internet interlopers to try and browse your network, and the MN-700 has some tricks to thwart the bad guys.
The router has an integrated stateful packet inspection (SPI) firewall to help keep hackers, port sniffers and other Internet-borne threats at bay. Network address translation (NAT) helps disguise the IP addresses of computers on your LAN from prying eyes, and MAC addressing means only computers with specific IP addresses hard-coded into their network adapter can access the base station, making attacks from via the Internet more difficult. A logging feature keeps track of hack attempts and a record of general network access.
All the major security features are turned on by default, so novice users are in little danger of setting up a system that will be wide open to potential unwelcome visitors.
As I mentioned, it supports standard 64- or 128-bit Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) security, which is a weak encryption system but better than nothing. But the base station also supports the new 256-bit WiFi Protected Access (WPA) security system, which is a much more effective way of keeping unauthorized users from accessing your network or intercepting data transfers. The down-side is that WPA doesn't work with many older pieces of WiFi hardware, so using it may mean upgrading all the wireless hardware on an existing home network.
The base station has parental controls that let you block access to certain sites if you don't want your child surfing porn or your husband surfing sports scores. It also has a DMZ feature that puts a PC temporarily outside the firewall's protective shield for things like faster gaming and video conferencing.
Notebook Card
The kit's notebook card is a standard adapter than fits any PC Card slot. Load the drivers, plug it in, enter your SSID/WEP/WPA codes, and you're up and running.
The aerial is built into the PC Card, which means there's nothing to get damaged in transit. On older cards, this was a problem because it meant greatly reduced reception, but on this unit the wrap-in antenna's reception was fine. I got a consistently strong signal and steady throughput.
The only other problem I had was with the Windows wireless network management utility that's bundled with the adapter. It's a control panel you can call up from the Windows task bar. It would often say the wireless connection was active when it wasn't, so I gave up relying on it for diagnostic guidance. The utility is still useful, though, giving instant access to things such as the system's throughput and security settings. USB Adapter
I also checked out the company's USB adapter for desktops and notebooks. It's an 802.11b unit, so it only runs at 11 Mbps, unlike 802.11g which runs at up to 54 Mbps (the company does offer an 802.11g USB adapter as well, along with a PCI adapter).
Microsoft's notebook USB adapter is a compact, stylish silver case about the size of a deck of cards. It has a long cord to make placement easier, and large LEDs show whether the device is connected, receiving a strong signal and transmitting/receiving data.
The software wizard is supposed to make installation easy, but it glitched on me the first time I ran it. I followed the instructions, but at the end the adapter refused to work even though it was connected and installed fine, according to the built-in status monitoring software.
I ran the wizard again without any luck. In the end, I opened the software's configuration window and plugged in the SSID network identification code, along with my WEP password and encryption level, and presto - everything worked. My advice, if you've configured a network before, is to skip the wizard and just configure the adapter yourself if you want to save some time.While the wizard was less than magical, the hardware is worth the money. The USB adapter had a phenomenal broadcast range and reception. In a basement room where I've experienced extremely weak WiFi reception or had no signal at all with other equipment, the Microsoft gear made an instant, rock-solid connection. It was able to maintain a signal strength that average in the 70 per cent range.
On a final note, Microsoft has made a smart move, offering 24-hour, seven-day-a-week product support - unlike many competitors, who offer limited live support. The company has recognized that networking is complex, and that many homeowners don't have the first clue about wired networking, let alone going wireless. For novice and intermediate users, having someone available at all times to talk them through installation problems is well worth the extra money that you'll pay for this hardware over bargain-priced gear.
So in a nutshell, you'll pay a premium for the Microsoft name on this line of 802.11b and 802.11g equipment, but the hardware is top of the line. All the necessary security features are there to protect the average home network, the manuals are among the clearest on the market, the software is well written, and the technical support is worth the price for anyone who is new to wireless networking.