Hi, just a quick question, which is more reliable and has better
transmission?
1) PCI wireless network card
2) USB wireless adaptor?
3) Wired 100Mb or 1000Mb
Either wireless option is inherantly very slow compared to
plain old wired ethernet. Even 10Mb is more reliable as
there are no dropped packets which can be an issue on
streaming media (though higher res media can exceed 10Mb
throughput). USB just adds further complications and thus
the PCI card is the better option, except that some PCI
cards only have an antenna on the back of the card instead
of on a short cable, so the large metal computer case is
effectively blocking a large % of the signal and that may
reduce performance.
The ideal is a PCI card, a short cable, and a tabletop
antenna. That's for short range. If you have longer range
needs you'll need consider a different antenna type.
Another reasonable option is to use a regular PCI (or
motherboard integrated) network adapter with a short
ethernet cable running from that to an access point (or a
leftover router acting as one, whichever). Having the
access point or router-as-access-point gains the ability to
reposition the antenna for better reception, plus the
elimination of the antenna cable so there is far less loss
from it.