A year ago, I finally got a new
laptop to replace my aging
Fujitsu LifeBook 420D. By aging I mean decrepid. By decrepid, I mean
Pentium 120 with no USB, a broken CD-ROM and a misaligned floppy drive. The
kind of laptop that makes me cringe when I show up at a customer’s site and
they ask, “Can you fix it?”
The question that needs to be asked is, “Is it worth fixing?” In this case, it
didn’t take me long to decide, “Hell no!” I got a good deal on the new laptop,
although it wasn’t a high end system, I think I got a good value for my money.
So far, my only complaints were the need to upgrade the RAM (a cheap fix) and the
left button on the touchpad. It has a mind of its own. Mostly, when I click it,
it ignores me. When it decides to respond, it makes up for lost time and clicks
twice. I’m under warranty, but I’ve already been told, “It might be a driver
problem and you’ll need to wipe the hard disk and install the recovery CD
before we can accept the warranty.” Yeah, I’ll get right on that. For now, I
have a little mouse I plug in when I need it. Soon, I’ll be upgrading the hard
disk. When I do, I’ll clone it, do the factory refresh and deal with the
warranty issue. Until then, I won’t be recommending the manufacturer or the
retailer to my customers.
The one thing I do love about my laptop is the freedom that comes with the
included 802.11g Wifi adapter. Along with my fancy, new D-Link DI-624 broadband
router, I can freely roam the house and even sit on the patio and enjoy the
sunset view over the lake while I merrily answer email and poke around online.
Usually.
When I first put in the router, I started having problems with interference. My
cordless phone is also 2.4 GHz and everytime the phone rang, my router would
reset. My desktop system would tell me that the ethernet signal disappeared and
I’d watch the interface cycle. Any data transfers I had going, remote shells,
and IRC would all bomb out. I lived with this for a few weeks until I got to
talking to one of my buddies online. He suggested I force the wireless radio to
use a different channel and avoid the interference. Lo and behold, it worked!
My router ceased its dance of death with my telephone and I thought all was
well.
Unfortunately, I won the battle, but the war was far from over. Although the
regular disconnects were over, I was still experiencing random, intermittent
disconnects. These disconnects would occur anywhere from two to twenty times
per day. I also had problems with large data transfers. Anytime I fired up
bittorrent or any other P2P applications, my connection would start dropping
every five to ten minutes and stay gone for around five minutes. The only way
to hasten the recovery would be to release and renew my IP address from the
command line. Believe it or not, I lived with this for almost a year. The straw
that broke the proverbial camel’s back was a sudden and immediate need to run a
VPN connection to one of my clients. After establishing the tunnel, the
connection was so slow, it was unusable. In fact, I couldn’t even get
Enterprise Manager to connect to the remote SQL Server database.
I ended up taking the router completely out of play and plugging my PC directly into
my cable modem. This worked great for my desktop, but it left my wireless
laptop feeling lonely and neglected. Of course, all the other annoying problems
went away as soon as I bypassed the router.
Last I checked, D-Link offered a three year warranty on their products. Since I
needed a new router for use in my office, I decided I would purchase a new
router, take the old to the office and get it replaced under warranty. Having a
definite plan of action, I proceeded to purchase a new router. As it happened,
Office Depot had the same model router on sale for about $40 (after mail-in
rebates). With my $15 bonus coupon from the rewards program, I would be out of
there spending less than $30 net on the router.
I installed the new router only to discover that it suffered the same problem
as my previous, allegedly defective router. I guess I had a premonition this
would happen, because I hadn’t yet carved up the box for the UPC symbol or sent
in my rebate forms. I resolved to return the router and purchase a completely
different brand. Since it was the weekend and gas was still close to $3/gal, I
suffered until Monday. Connecting and disconnecting cables from the
cable modem and my PC was getting a bit old, so I tried logging into the
router’s web interface and turning off the wireless radio. Without the wireless
function, the router worked nearly perfectly. I say nearly because I was still
getting a couple of disconnects daily.
Yesterday, I exchanged the D-Link for a Linksys WRT54G router. I chose this one
because I anticipated great fun playing with the open source firmware. Not that
I intended to write my own Linux build for the box, but I knew a few people had
enhanced the stock build considerably and thought it would be fun to play.
Installing the router took only a few moments. I flashed the router with the
latest official firmware build and my connection has been flawless. I even
downloaded a 350 MB torrent last night and never once did my connection to IRC
cycle.
Postscript: My new router appears to be TOO new to use third party firmware.
The router uses revision 4 hardware (my serial number starts with CDFA) and the
likes of Sveasoft’s Alchemy refused to load. They promise support in version 1.1. I can’t wait.