The situation is this:
- an apartment with 3 rooms
- a Linksys WRT54GL router set in the center of an apartment secured with WPA2Personal
- two desktop computers
- each room is separated by one wall from the router

I would like to know what to choose: a pci based wifi network card or a USB wifi dongle? Which of these two are more reliable when talking about signal strength and transfer rate.

One desktop runs Slackware 13 (mine) and another one runs Windows Xp (it will be converted soon i hope).

These days I tend to go with USB devices for simplicity. If need be I can borrow a USB WLAN adapter from one computer and use it in another (if, for example, a visiting friend needs to get WLAN access and doesn't have built in Wifi). Plus the are usually dirt cheap.

I do not think that USB or PCI will matter much when it comes to signal strengh, but make sure you get one with that is fully compatible with Linux. It should have a real driver and not have to rely on extracting binary blobs from firmware drivers. Good choices are often Intel, Atheros and Ralink based devices.

Neither a PCI wireless NIC and USB wireless NIC will work in a reliable and stable way. The PCI card will create conflicts with your computer and the USB wireless NIC will not have the power to handle weak signals or fight against interference. Also support for either device is questionable.

The best way is buy an access point or a wireless to wired bridge for each room. This makes it easy to setup desktop computers by using their wired NIC which are more reliable and stable.

I strongly recommend setting a complete wired network even though it is an apartment. Ask your landlord if you or them can drill holes in the wall to fish through Ethernet cable. If you plan where you drill the holes like in a closet, you will not see them.

I think the above is a great idea, and one that hadn't occurred to me before reading this thread. Thanks Electro! That may be the perfect solution for our own wireless problems here at home (lack of decent Linux drivers for the devices).

But I have mixed feelings about the above:

A) Proper and full support, particularly regarding encryption, is definitely sketchy, unless you get one of those relatively few devices that is FULLY supported and known to work well w/Linux. A device that barely works, is not fun at all.

B) But as for the PCI devices creating conflicts, I've never had that. Why should they create any more or less conflicts than any other PCI device?

Kind regards,
Sasha

Thanks for the answer guys. I will try to rethink were I will put the router so my desktop and my collegues one should be connected using cables.