My sister's wireless card died and now I need to replace it, and I thought a USB wifi card would be nice because it's easier to install and etc, but are they as good as PCI cards? Do they have the same range and speed?

They have extremely short range, but higher top speeds.
480Mbps at 3 meters and 110Mbps at 10 meters.

Though I say just get another PCI card if she won't notice the diff.

There where no change in speeds for me when I made the switch... but then again I use a repeater. BW tests still score over 2mbps, and the usual download sites are still 200-600 kbps. I replaced my pci nic with a usb one (because ran out of pci slots in my new mother board) and I haven't noticed a difference in my connection since.

How far away is your router from the pc? I could kick my repeater and test my connection (15 meters away here)

They have extremely short range, but higher top speeds.
480Mbps at 3 meters and 110Mbps at 10 meters.

Though I say just get another PCI card if she won't notice the diff.

I'm not concerned about she noticing the difference, I'm concerned about she breaking it again


Chainer I don't have a router yet, the two PCs are operating on AD-HOC mode and there are two walls in the microwaves' path, they're made of concrete (or maybe just bricks, I don't know what this building is made of) and are about 12 cms thick

And the distance is about 6 meters or less

Average download speeds for a cable modems are only around 6-12 Mbps, so you wont notice an increase of 54 to 480 for the network card since 50 is already 10x faster than the cable modem is possible of going.

Nevermind, she doesn't live here anymore