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Hi,

I have just set up a wireless connection for a friend and it works fine for
surfing the internet but he is complaining that when he plays World of
Warcraft that he keeps losing because the connection is too slow, is this
possible that the wireless is slowing his connection down?

His adaptor is a Netgear and its 54mbps, his internet speed is 2mbps.

Thank you for any help or advice.

Wireless 802.11g will be 22-24mbps on the internal LAN at best. Over
the Internet it is further limited by the speed offered by your ISP.
In general, wireless is not the best choice for gaming. If the
wireless on the router is only 802.11b, then there is no way it
would be good enough for gaming.

If you need more, post info on the model and hardware revs of the
router and the firmware, moe details on the adapter (if it is USB
connected to a 1.1 or 2.0 port as well) and which ISP.


On Fri, 6 Apr 2007 00:08:00 -0700, crocket
<> wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I have just set up a wireless connection for a friend and it works fine for
>surfing the internet but he is complaining that when he plays World of
>Warcraft that he keeps losing because the connection is too slow, is this
>possible that the wireless is slowing his connection down?
>
>His adaptor is a Netgear and its 54mbps, his internet speed is 2mbps.
>
>Thank you for any help or advice.
--

Barb Bowman
MS Windows-MVP
Expert Zone & Vista Community Columnist
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/e...ts/bowman.mspx
http://blogs.digitalmediaphile.com/barb/

crocket wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have just set up a wireless connection for a friend and it works fine for
> surfing the internet but he is complaining that when he plays World of
> Warcraft that he keeps losing because the connection is too slow, is this
> possible that the wireless is slowing his connection down?
>
> His adaptor is a Netgear and its 54mbps, his internet speed is 2mbps.
>
> Thank you for any help or advice.
>
You have to remember that wireless at 54 mbps does not mean that your
can constantly sustain that theoretical rate. Wireless NIC driver are
doing a lot of other things on the medium without your knowledge. For
example, the NIC driver needs to ever so often scan all the wireless
channels to satisfy roaming requirements of 802.11. So what happens
that that all network traffic is temporary suspending while the driver
scans. This causes traffic to kind of hiccup, which could be disastrous
if your network game gets the command to launch a missile a second or
two after you tried to launch it.

Even if your computer is a non-mobile desktop, the NIC driver will still
scan.

((&->

On 6-Apr-2007, QuasiCodo <> wrote:

> > Hi,
> >
> > I have just set up a wireless connection for a friend and it works fine for
> > surfing the internet but he is complaining that when he plays World of
> > Warcraft that he keeps losing because the connection is too slow, is this
> > possible that the wireless is slowing his connection down?
> >
> > His adaptor is a Netgear and its 54mbps, his internet speed is 2mbps.
> >
> > Thank you for any help or advice.

It could be due to delays beyond, or due to, his ISP, which aren't
noticeable during web surfing, reading emails etc.
Utilities like ping and pathping are part of XP and should help
diagnosis. There are other utilities with graphical interfaces that
you can buy, but the XP ones, intellegently used, tell you a lot.
It's also worth going to a few speed checking sites.
I say a few, 2 or 3, because their servers are in different locations,
and tend to give different results, you should also test at different
times of day, in "The wee small hours" is a good time, as it
should give speeds to compare against at other times of day.
Some ISP's traffic shape, possibly discriminating against the
gaming community, because of their use of bandwidth, to the
detrement of other users.
Solution get a better ISP which may cost more.
On the hardware side, wired is usually faster than wireless,
but make sure all the devices are 100Mbps.
One 10Mbps device will slow things down.
Many gamers set profiles to optimise their PC's for gaming,
not starting non-essential services comes to mind, and he
may be competeing against players with top of the range
hardware, with fast response times.
Even the mouse plays its part and gamers prefer certain
mice, not to mention top of the range dual card graphics.
..