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