I agree with Erik- Like so many other key specs we look are tuned into with consumer electronics each vendor will often publish there specifications in a different unit of measure. Laptop batteries are a perfect example. Vendors will post their numbers as miliamp/hours, watt/hours, amp/hours, number of cells, etc. Having said that I am sure there is some report somewhere where wifi has been scientifically analyzed Outside of that I have heard of people having success of purchasing a usb hi Gain antenna . I purchased one for a laptop to help with a similar aforementioned signal problem. I even went to the extent of getting a short usb extension cable so I could mount it high on the screen bezel. After all that work i did not note any increase in performance. I think there are other brands where people have had good success. David Nelsen, BoTG Healthcare Technical Analyst Slingshot Healthcare Informatics Office 651.472.5678 Skype: slingshot.hci On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 5:57 PM, Erik Anderson <erikerik at gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 5:20 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > > > > 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. > > This sort of thing is quite hard to pin down. The performance > discrepancy could be caused by any one (or multiple) of the following: > > - radio hardware > - antenna design > - antenna placement > - internal RF interference within the laptop body > - Wifi chipset firmware issues > - sub-par OS WLAN drivers > - etc. etc. > > > 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! > > ;-) > > In most situations, the presence or absence of external antennas is > neither here nor there. At 2.4 and 5GHz, antennas do not need to be > all that long. The wavelength of 2.4GHz signals is around 125mm and > 5GHz, about 60mm. Figure a half or quarter-wave antenna, and you don't > need all that much space. Frequently laptop manufactures will route > wifi antennas to the top of the display panel. In Apple's case, I > believe they put the Wifi and bluetooth antennas in the hinge area of > the body, as that's the only non-metal (read: RF transparent) part of > the laptop. > > -Erik > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20130128/9abdfc32/attachment.html>