Consumer Reports at it again
- TAGS:consumer reports
- IT TOPICS:Hardware, Mobile
Back in May, I criticized a review Consumer Reports magazine did of netbook computers (What Consumer Reports didn't tell you about netbooks). It was a fairly long critique.
Many computer articles in the magazine strike me as amateurish. I'll never forget the one on external hard drives, but that's another story.
Is it me? Am I too harsh? Expecting too much?
Last week they published a blog posting The things no one ever told me about college which also strikes me as amateurish. But lets leave opinion behind for fact.Â
The blog posting recommends WEP for encrypting wireless networks.Â
WEP was disgraced years ago and has been replaced by WPA which, in turn, has been replaced by WPA2.Â
This is telling. It says something, not only about the technical expertise of the original author, but also about the organization. After being online for a week, no one at the magazine has yet caught this error and corrected it. Â
Back to opinion.
The whole idea of your own wireless router in a college dorm room is debatable. Wired Ethernet connections are faster, more secure, simpler and more reliable than wireless. Â
And, you don't need wireless to work in a couple different locations within a room. Ethernet cables can be over 300 feet, long enough to snake around the edges of a dorm room, out of the way. A standard consumer router can supply a wired connection to four locations in the room. If you need more wired locations a cheap switch can add more ports.
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