USB Wireless card causes lockups

doylejul · **8th July 2008, 06:01 PM**

Hi everyone,
I know that I already have answered the question by posing it, but does anyone know of a solution/workaround for a USB 802.11g wireless card occasionally causing my media centre PC to lockup? It happens when I am watching divx movies streamed magically through the air from my file server. My router died and I had to plug in an ethernet cable for a few weeks and the box ran fine the whole time it was wired.
The NIC is an SIS163u chipset card. The house isn't cabled and the other half doesn't like snaking cable across the floor...(no idea why, i think it adds ambience to the room...)
Has anyone else experienced similar problems? I am thinking about getting a PCI wireless card can anyone recommend a particular card?

Thanks

pantonious · **8th July 2008, 11:16 PM**

i've never had much luck with USB Wireless adapters.

They overheat, have dodgy drivers and the USB connector is easilly damaged/worn.

If you have room, a PCI card is definately better. I like Netgear and Minitar/MSI (i think Minitar was bought out by MSI...) but mostly they are the same.

there are some people that have issues with the PCI wireless cards causing stuttering in Live TV. Sometimes this is fixed by changing the PCI slot the wireless card is in...sometimes not.

On my HDHTPC i do not have room for a PCI wireless card, so i purchased a DLINK DWG 810+. It is a ethernet to wireless bridge...a little like an access point, but only for one machine and it is designed simply to connect to an existing wireless network.

I've never had any problems with that, it works really great

doylejul · **9th July 2008, 08:10 AM**

Thanks for that info. I'll take your advice and try and Netgear PCI card. My tuner is a USB2 dual tuner which has been working really well since I ditched the Dvico Dual PCI card a few months back. The only other PCI device in the box is a sound card so hopefully should be OK with a NIC on the bus as well.

insomnia · **10th July 2008, 10:16 AM**

The problem is with wireless, you can get all kinds of interference from things like cordless phones. Being wired is always the best option because you are always going to have a consistant 100/1000 megabit connection. Wireless will work for streaming video but I would not rely on it as your main network connection because when trying to stream things like divx movies and any encoded movies its going to break up occasionally due to the large amount of data being buffered.

doylejul · **10th July 2008, 10:34 PM**

I never seem to have any issues with interference despite the fact that there are about 5 other networks in range. The issue just seems to be a budget card running budget drivers that is hanging off the USB bus.
My experience has been that devices that should really hang off the southbridge or PCI bus should stay on there, not be hacked on the USB bus. They just never work as well as advertised (eg USB soundcards, USB wireless as well as USB wired NICs).
The exception to that rule has been the DigitalNow Twin USB2 dual tuner which has performed flawlessly ever since I installed it. Sooooooooooooooo much better than the dvico dual pci card it replaced.