dilemna before buying new Dell laptop

I've got a wireless 802.11b network at home. Everything in my house
had "b" capability except I'm not sure of one laptop (inspiron 600m;
maybe this has b/g capability??). Please correct me if I'm wrong
here.

Ok, so my question is... if I should by a Dell laptop (not sure which
model but less than $900) which has an internal 802.11g card, what are
my options to make it get on my home network? Can I swap it out with
a "b" card? It would be a rather expensive upgrade to swap out all my
computers at home (several plus the router) so I'd rather not do that
unless I have another reason to and besides, if I do that maybe the
"pre N" or eventually the "N" card would be wiser. What are my
options here?

thanks in advance all.

 

It'll work just fine, they are upwards compatable. B clients will
work on G and Pre-N (and probably Draft-N and Real-N) APs, G clients
will work on B and {all the N} APs, etc.

 

Should be backward compatible and fully capable of 802.11b. No other
upgrades necessary.


Stew

 

Well that's partially true. G is definitely backwards compatible with
B, however for a B card to join a G (and most likely a N) network, the
access point has to be set into mixed mode. This will lower the overall
performance of the network (even for communication between two G clients
for example). The performance hit typically isn't substantial (beyond
the obvious slowdown of a B client talking to a G or vice versa), but
it's definitely present. A workaround is to connect a separate B AP to
the G AP and have it act as a bridge between the two networks.

For the original poster, you should also note 802.11A is not compatible
with B or G or N (A operates at a much higher frequency). With that
said, there are cards which can receive both A & B/G (eg. Intel's IPW2900)

 

Good point. However, the OP doesn't know about these details, so the
chances that he'll buy an AP and configure it for G-only are
vanishingly small. [Note to the OP: Don't do that.]