My girlfriend and I had just moved into a new apartment. We signed up for a cable internet service, which was connected to my main PC. But what to do with the other three systems in the place (2 laptops and a desktop)? The landlord was not too thrilled with the idea of us running wires through the duplex. The solution? Intel's Wireless Anypoint!

At first, I was a little nervous. I had been running a 10Mbit network before, so the idea of stepping down to 1.6Mbit was a bit scary, especially at $120 per PC. Fortunately, that's plenty for most broadband connections. Setup was ridiculously easy - plug the adapter into the USB port or PCMCIA slot, insert driver disk, answer a few easy questions along the lines of "is this the system connected to the internet?" and *bang* we were off and running. Security was not an issue - it includes firewall software which performs well enough for my needs.

So far, so good. Over time, however, we noticed that the network would disappear occasionally. Nothing serious, maybe two minutes at most. But annoying. Finally, I broke down and emailed Intel. Within 12 hours, I had a reply that suggested I remove any unneeded IPX entries in my Network section. Did so and since then, no problems at all.

If you either have a laptop or a situation where drilling holes is not an option, then I would strongly recommend you look into the Intel Anypoint Wireless Home Networking. It has solved my problems here and worked very well.

Recommended: Yes