December 23, 2007 09:11 AM UTC
(Updated: December 23, 2007 09:13 AM UTC)
I know, most of you probably aren't too interested in my celebrations of small victories. Well, we were buying stuff for my wife's ipod touch. Mostly a case and a set of speakers. We were up at Radio Shack, and I saw that they had d-link USB wireless-N sticks along with a USB wireless-N Router at roughly a price point of $60 each. So, as loathe as I am to spend money on relatively old technology (after all, this laptop is probably similar to laptops which are 5 years old or so), I did plunk down some money on getting the newer wireless-N routers and USB cards going, so I might restore the wireless capabilities of my home laptop. The setup took awhile. Ultimately, I was happy that I got it working without calling my ISP's technicians in Subik Bay, Phillipines, or wherever in the Philipines. I like that we got a case for my ipod. It's a had small camera case, but it holds an ipod touch snugly when zipped up. I still need to get my wife's laptop working with the new wireless network, but life is good.
I'd been thinking about the wireless-N routers and setups for awhile, but at high price points, I had a tough time rationalizing plunking down the money. Maybe the fact that these are D-link stuffs, might indicate cheapness, but it looks pretty cool.
On other news, I'm also downloading alot of woodsongs music podcasts. I guess a bad thing about working with technology is that one can sort of get caught up in the latesat and greatest. Personally, I would have rather not had to upgrade components, but when I upgraded my system from MS to linux, I lost the wireless drivers, and when I went back to MS, then windows XP didn't know/want to recognize that I had an internal wireless card.
When I loaded the drivers for the wireless-N stick, the wireless-G card found the drivers, but now I'm ticked off enough to want to forge ahead and get this working. I did, and it I guess works good, we'll see how much the range and throughput has improved, but I'm happy for now that things seem to be okay.
I guess the biggest thing I've got going on as far as wireless security is the fact that I am not broadcasting my SSID to the neighborhood. Then I've got a key and phrase encrypting traffic, so it's good on a relative scale.
When I used the mac address binding, it stopped working. Maybe at some point in the future, I'll do the wireless Mac Address binding. For now, I'm happy that it is working.
Life is very good. The reporting thus far says that the network speed seems a bit faster. more testing will need to confirm this.
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Comments: 7
Have a safe and a very Merry Christmas!!
:)