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Rollout: AirMagnet Laptop Analyzer Pro: Page 2 of 4

Looking Good

This release spruces up the GUI with a Microsoft-like look and feel. Gone are the rounded edges at the corners of the main window, and maximizing the window actually locks it into place. Keeping in line with Microsoft's latest visuals, menus are kept to an absolute minimum and icons dominate the top row.

The Start screen details signal levels for the two bands on the left; AirWise alarms and graphs are found at the bottom; and the center of the screen lists all discovered wireless devices and key attributes. Hovering with the mouse over any device generates a tool tip that list much more, such as time of first/last received packet, signal strength, number of alarms on that channel and associated AP. New in this release is the ability to group, sort and filter the information as needed, letting network administrators or technicians organize and focus on the data most helpful to them.

Less attractive is that some of the information reported by the product in our tests was inaccurate. Most of the time the software reported that our laptop was operating on 802.11b, for example, but it actually has an integrated 802.11a/b/g Broadcom chipset that was associated and transferring data at 54 Mbps. AirMagnet confirmed this bug and says it's working on a fix. Analyzer also indicated that we were using 802.1X security, but we were using WPA-PSK, which was documented on another screen; again, AirMagnet is working on a fix for this bug. These inaccuracies in our small test bed suggest that some of the data gathered should be verified in some other way.

The Interference page is all new and has the same channel list on the left side of the page, but shows a dynamically computed interference score, number of hidden stations and number of interferers. The details of each value are listed in the middle of the screen. The interference-score column can be sorted so you can quickly identify the worst channel and start digging into the sources. If AirMagnet's Spectrum Analyzer is installed on the same machine as the Pro version of Laptop Analyzer, it will identify non-Wi-Fi sources of interference. The interference score can fluctuate considerably based on the traffic level of any particular device, sometimes making it harder to track down problems related to short but heavy bursts in traffic.