I'm sort of curious what the best choice is for wireless on that tier of hardware. I sort of want to use the NTP client rather than waste a slot for a clock card, but I don't think I'm going to have a good spot with Ethernet access for the machine.
Seems like the common consensus is $10 scrapyard NIC plus Wi-Fi bridge. TBH, I was always surprised that the consumer Wi-Fi bridge was never a popular thing. You'd think it would sell more easily to customers, because most PCs have had Ethernet on board since like 2000, and even adding a USB dongle means having to bring new drivers in.
Now going full off tangent-- what happened to old wireless client hardware? If you go into any thrift shop, you're going to see a bunch of old 802.11g or n routers, but you usually don't see the adapters. I could see internal ones being scrapped with the PCs they were in, but I'd expect people who bought a new-spec router and matching adapter would replace them together.
in the era of 802.11b and 802.11g being the hottest and greatest thing for wireless clients, there were very few desktop PCs equipped with interface cards for it.
generally it was built into laptops for 95% of the clients... Your typical Dell business laptop from the year 2000 came with a minipci slot and a 2.4 GHz antenna cable, populating the slot with an 802.11b card was an option.
or something like the original apple airport wireless AP and the wifi 802.11b built into macbooks from the era.
or in an even earlier era you would find like PCMCIA/PC Card type 2 or type 3 interfaces with an 802.11b radio and antenna in them to stick out the side of your laptop.
But I figured a lot of people did buy USB dongles for their desktop, i. e. "set up the old PC for the kids to do schoolwork in another room nowhere near the router." There should be bags full of them everywhere.
I actually have an 802.11b PCMCIA card sitting around. I bought it in 2003 because my university was rolling out a wireless network, accessible in about 1/6 of its surface area, and I was rocking a used Pentium II Thinkpad. Getting Slackware to handle 802.11 in those days was an amusing thing.
Seems like the common consensus is $10 scrapyard NIC plus Wi-Fi bridge. TBH, I was always surprised that the consumer Wi-Fi bridge was never a popular thing. You'd think it would sell more easily to customers, because most PCs have had Ethernet on board since like 2000, and even adding a USB dongle means having to bring new drivers in.
Now going full off tangent-- what happened to old wireless client hardware? If you go into any thrift shop, you're going to see a bunch of old 802.11g or n routers, but you usually don't see the adapters. I could see internal ones being scrapped with the PCs they were in, but I'd expect people who bought a new-spec router and matching adapter would replace them together.