A few questions...

[jjblanche]

I have an apple airport express base station (the one that plugs into the wall, like a big A/C adapter). Would this be a solid performer for a gaming system set up in the same room? I'd prefer the wireless because running cables would be a real PITA.

There is one other wireless router close to where I want to put the airport express. I would lock the airport with a password, so other comps couldn't get on it, but will being in close proximity to another wireless router somehow scramble or slow down the signal? Also, I intend to run a Mac mini off the airport as well. Would having another system running off the same airport impact overall performance (for the purposes of a game)?

Finally, do any of you know a good wireless card that would run fine with no issues on Vista ultimate 64 right out of the box?

Thanks.

 

[brw02005]

well here is how I would handle this. I would use a program called netstumbler to check what channels my neighbors were running at. There are three main that don't interfere 1,6,and 11. Most routers default to 6 so if you don't know 1 and 11 are good guesses. As for throughput Airport expresses are great with WPA encryption I get 12 mbps through almost all my house with two of them in WDS mode. You could probably get more with WPA2 encryption (it's more efficient generally). As for whether having two computers will affect your gaming this primarily depends on your internet or file transfers between computers. If your transferring files between computers or downloading on one computer while playing on the other it might effect it.

As for the vista 64 bit sry outside my expertise. I assume anything with a an atheros g chipset would work since they work for linux, mac, xp, ect. Personally I avoid vista like the plague. I would much rather run ubuntu with windows xp on a virtualbox virtual machine for my engineering apps. But for gaming I guess it going to have to be xp or vista. Hope this helps you out.