Thanks to everyone for the explanations. The note about two-way communication is very important and something I haven't been thinking about enough -- it isn't just that the computer can "hear" the wireless router, but it also has to have the power to be heard by it effectively. This reminds me that I wanted to ask what you know about the wireless capabilities of various laptops and netbooks. It seems to me that my recently-purchased HP Pavilion g7-2022us does nowhere near as well as my Asus Eee 1005HA at maintaining a connection to a wireless router. If the signal seems weak, the the HP is having trouble, I can use the Asus. Is that because of reception or transmission? Has this been measured for various machines with results posted to the web? It is a very important aspect of performance, but I have never read specs on this and I can't find any now. I'm disappointed that the HP performs so poorly compared to the much cheaper and older Asus. I remember that Negroponte's XO (OLPC) laptop was supposed to do perform well with a weak signal (despite its low price). I saw him say on a TV interview that this good performance was "because of the ears" (also known as wifi antennas). Here are the ears: http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/image_maps/07/1179000000/1179824483/img/navigation2_416.gif This led me to ask myself an obvious question: Where are my ears? None of my laptop/netbooks have external ears. How good are their internal ears and how do they compare with those of the OLPC XO-1+ machines? I want numbers! ;-) Mike
