XPS 1330 Wireless USB feedback

I just got my XPS 1330 today. I mentioned I'd give people an update on how the wireless USB works. I will probably be pretty busy for the next few days and won't be able to post an extensive review but I'd like some feedback on what you want to know.

Unfortunately my limitation is that I currently only have a USB mouse that I could use for testing range. I don't have a USB hard drive for testing speed of file transfers or a printer that will work with Windows Vista. Anyways, let me know if you have any specific questions and I'll try to find an answer and incorporate it probably Sunday or Monday.

 

I got mine last week. The transfer speeds seem to cap out at about 4MB a second, so it's much slower than wired USB. Also, not all devices are compatible. USB HDTV Tuners don't work. Not all the functions of all-in-one printers work. So basically at this moment I don't see much use for it since you could just get a network printer or print server.

 

I see. I wish I hadn't bought it now. lol. What range do you get with it? I think I won't worry about it too much now since you already have. I appreciate it...I didn't know how I was going to do anything useful with only a mouse that would work with Vista....

 

I had posted asking if anyone knows if a USB docking station will work over WUSB. I thought it would as WUSB is specd the same as USB 2.0. I emailed kensington and they told me it would not work. I actually thought that maybe they didnt understand what I was talking about as their response was somewhat cryptic. Based on what you're saying, its seems like a USB dock with video vga, network, etc, probably wont work well. Can you confirm? This is very disappointing, I was actually going to ask Dell if I could get a replacement and pay extra for WUSB, but maybe I won't.

Thanks and please post your observations when you can!

 

Well you can't say they are the same spec, wireless USB is an extension, and of course it requires a radio! A wireless USB device cannot magically connect to a non-wireless device without radio (like the docking station mentioned). Also, high definition video will never work, since it requires tons of band width, you can't move the bits fast enough over wireless. Specs are here.

 

Um, they have the proper docking station.

 

There was a question earlier if usb 2.0 docking station would work with wireless usb. No.

 

Sure it would. You plug it into the wireless usb hub. You can daisy chain as many as you would like.

 

Another way I thought it might be useful is to put the hub near my receiver and have a USB soundcard plugged into it so I could play music on my laptop. But it looks like this won't work either. I don't know if it's a limitation of the WUSB spec or this particular hub. The documentation for it at

http://belkin.httpsvc.vitalstreamcd...eam_com/support/dl/p75590-a_f5u303_manual.pdf

states:

Support for USB Classes
Audio devices (“USB Audio” class) and some webcams
(“USB Video” class), which have isochronous end points, are
not supported by the Hub.

So basically, it's useful for only storage devices and printers. But you could hook them up to the network without WUSB, and a flash drive would be more convenient to plug straight into the laptop and probably more safely. I would imagine if you lost your wireless connection while using WUSB to a storage device, you could end up with data corruption.