Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/05/802_11a_rocks_palm_crypto/

802.11a rocks, Palm crypto, graphics goods

Mobo muttering & more

By James Watson

Posted in Personal Tech, 5th December 2001 16:20 GMT

HWRoundup WLAN: Extreme Technology got its hands on some 802.11a networking kit from Proxim and Atheros to compare its performance with older 802.11b WLAN kit. At first looks, performance is decent, transferring data up to five times quicker (at short distances).

It will take some time for this to become mainstream and there are some issues to watch out for, but Extremetech expects 802.11a should work (mostly) comfortably alongside your existing wireless stuff. The article discusses pros and cons surrounding the 802.11b standard, looks at what the next-gen standard promises and lots more.



Crypto, Windows on Linux

Geek.com has a

review of some encryption software called ReadThis!

for the Palm OS that allows you to encrypt (and, uhh, decrypt) any information you can edit on the screen in any application. The site gives it a full thumbs up with five 'Geekheads'.



THG has an article on how to run Windows inside Linux with Win4Lin, if anyone would actually want to do so. Expect performance to suck on anything except high-speed boxes.



Graphics goods

Tweakers Asylum has

benchmarked a range of nVidia Detonator drivers on the Windows 9x and ME platforms

, seeing what kind of performance progress the vendor has made during its driver progression.



AMDZone has a review of a Hercules Game Theatre XP (yet more companies jumping onto the 'XP' bandwagon), which provides a home theatre sound card package. Gamers are supposed to be most excited about this.



Crucial reply, more mobo muttering

We've been discussing issues with MSI's K7T266Pro2-RU board for a bit and a Canadian reseller recently suggested that there may be issues with Crucial Technology's memory modules when you stick in two chips, although it's fine with one. Crucial has since gotten back to us, saying its chips are not yet approved for that mobo, so it remains off its 'Memory Selector' list. If you want to risk it, then, well, your mileage may vary. It's working on getting its chips approved.



On the topic of issues with mobos, the lads at VR-Zone ran into problems when trying to overclock some boards where 166MHz memory registers at 133MHz in some instances. Geeks at Leadtek that they spoke to reckon it's to do with the internal design of the SiS chipset. ®




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