Tag: wireless network card

How Do You Deal With It?

I like Noah Finz, our sports guy at the TV station. I like his wife, Kendra, too. I’ve known her a lot longer than I’ve known Noah. They are both technophobes.

Actually, being a little skittish in the face of technology puts them in step with most everyone, which leads me to what happened today.

Noah’s laptop was old. He wanted to upgrade to faster hardware, especially with a two year old, infant and very nice camera for picture taking.

Most people would have unplugged the old machine, plugged in the new and then forgotten what was left on the laptop. Sure, they’re networked together, but how many people know how that works? Few!

I popped in the car and headed to Fairfield County.

His Dell desktop machine was the most quiet PC I’ve ever heard – startling, since the trend has been in the opposite direction. It needed a Firewire and wireless network card. No sweat, except it only had two slots, one of which was already filled by a dial-up modem.

“Put this away,” I told Noah as I handed it to him in an anti-static bag. Truthfully, it will never be used.

The Firewire card was effortlessly installed suing native Windows drivers. The wireless card was more trouble. It didn’t conform to Belkin’s instructions!

It finally installed because I ad libbed. How do they sell and support these things when the installation process isn’t remotely connected to what’s in the instructions?

As with Helaine’s computer, this Dell came loaded with ‘nagware.’ I don’t want programs bugging me. Some are difficult to remove. Others are confusingly described. Most have limited lifespans, meaning you’re later expected to shell out more money for the software that came on your PC!

Hats off to Cablevision, Noah’s ISP. Their Optonline cable modem service has an automated configuration tool which set up Outlook Express correctly on the first try.

We installed Picasa, MS Office, the new free AOL anti-virus suite and a few others. Then it was time to move photos and documents. I couldn’t get his computers to speak to each other. I have no idea why, nor do I know how I finally encouraged them to have limited access to each other.

It just happened.

You never accomplish 100% on a mission of mercy like this, but we came close. Again, I have no idea how Noah or Kendra could have done this themselves, and they can’t be alone.

What do most people do? Or do people like me just drive around on weekends helping out and playing with little kids – they couldn’t have been cuter.

Greetings From Ventnor City

I’m writing this from the kitchen of my friend Peter’s condo in Ventnor City, NJ. Honest, there is a Ventnor City, NJ… just down the road from Atlantic City. The people here call it Ventnor.

My journey started after work Friday night. Knowing I have no organizational skills, or willpower, going home after work would have just meant an extended period of putting off going to bed… so I set out for Peter’s house, in Cherry Hill, NJ at 11:35 PM.

That was a good idea because traffic was light and I made it in just under three hours. Not bad. EZ-Pass is good on the NJ Turnpike, making the trip even easier.

I didn’t relish the idea of a long drive but I had my cell phone along with the earpiece I seldom use. I knew if I got my Cousin Michael on the phone from California… well, let’s just say Michael is never at a loss for words.

That’s a good thing because I enjoy talking with him. Between Michael, Melissa and Max (their son) I kept busy through the Bronx, over the George Washington Bride and well into New Jersey. Finally I gave up because my ear was getting sore.

I also decided to run a ‘science experiment’ during the drive. I put my laptop in the front seat, powered by an inverter, working off the car’s battery so it would last the whole trip. The laptop had a wireless network card and GPS receiver hooked up and ran a free piece of software call NetStumbler.

As I drove along, sometimes every few seconds and sometimes only a few times an hour, a little sound went off and the computer would log the presence of a wireless access point. Some were password protected while others would have gladly (OK – gladly is overdoing it) allowed me to connect to the Internet or anything else behind their firewall!

After I return to Connecticut I’ll try and publish some lists and maps to show you what got logged. It was very interesting to me and I tried disparately not to look at the computer screen as I sped along at 70 mph.

I made it to Peter’s house around 2:30 AM. For me that’s the shank of the day. For Peter, it’s the middle of the night. He woke up and let me in. He even nuked a few burgers for me!

Saturday morning started with a visit to his nephew’s baseball game, breakfast at a deli and then a trip to the Jersey Shore. Peter recently bought a 2005 Acura RL and we felt it was necessary to test all the buttons&#185.

Some parts of the car, like the XM Satellite Radio, were interesting. Peter and I agree the XM ‘decade channels’ play too many marginal songs (not hits) – probably an effort to avoid repetition and there’s no real ‘oldies’ channel as such. I did find the comedy channels interesting and am envious of his ability to hear every baseball game… though as a non-sports fan he will listen to none.

When a car is packed with gadgets, as this one is, there are things which seem superfluous or a little over the top. If, instead of touching a button, you’d like to wait five or ten seconds and hope your command is understood, you can tell the car’s climate control system to turn down the fan or adjust the temperature. Using the button is easier!

Mostly this is a sweet car and I enjoyed the ride to the shore.

Though sunny, today was blustery and cool. Still, we decided to take a walk down the boardwalk. The water was rough with spray coming off each breaking wave. The beach, as you might expect for April, was empty.

As we walked the beach, we ran into a flock of tiny birds. Though they do fly, most of the time they scamper on the sand, chasing the waterline in and out with the waves. They’re looking for food, I’m sure, but they were fun to watch because they’re totally in sync and choreographed perfectly.

There is no outward sign of communications between these birds, but they must know what the others are going to do. They change direction on a dime and never bump into each other!

Tonight we had dinner at the Tun, near the Atlantic City Convention Center. I’m on Atkins (again), so I told my waitress I’d rather not have the potatoes with my meal. Could she substitute something else? “How about French Fries,” was her reply.

The steak was very good and there was plenty of it. There was no Splenda for my coffee (a recurring theme of late), so I pulled a pack from the stash in my wallet. This is what 54 year old guys carry in their wallets instead of condoms.

After dinner we went to the Tropicana to see a comedy show. The Comedy Stop at the Trop has been there for at least 25 years. Recently it moved to nicer quarters in the hotel’s new wing called The Quarter. In fact the whole addition is very nice, somewhat reiniscent of the shops at some Vegas casinos.

We stopped in the Spy Store where I found some items going for many multiples of what the same thing sells for on EBay. I wasn’t expecting bargains, but this was a little ridiculous.

The comdey show itself was good and the comedians fine… at least that’s my impression from the audience reaction. Maybe I just wasn’t in a comedy mood tonight?

&#185 – There is a button that Peter just can’t figure out. If you have any idea what the “DISP MODE” button does, drop me a line.

The Geek In Me Speaks

Here’s a major surprise – I love computers. I find them fascinating and am always tempted to learn what I can and expand the envelope, if possible.

It’s possible this goes back to my first experience with computers, in high school in 1967. Somehow, we had two computers at school. Actually, we had one – an IBM 360 (I think) which was booted by flipping switches in the proper order and ‘fed’ with punch cards or paper tape.

What seemed like our second computer was a Model 34 Teletype, somehow connected by phone line to a computer at a local college. I played Wumpus, Golf and Horse Racing. Everything came out as printed text on that very slow teletypewriter.

In 1978 I got a Radio Shack TRS-80. Later, I got a Commodore 64 and then a series of PCs, culminating in the homebuilt Athlon XP 1600+ machine I’m composing this on.

I like being on the ‘bleeding’ edge, so I’ve kept an old computer handy and loaded Linux as the operating system. Depending on whom you believe, Linux will soon roust Windows as the operating system of choice, sending Bill Gates and the Evil Empire to the poorhouse… or it is an ill conceived idea promulgated by geeks who can’t really see who the final user will be (I saw Walter Mossberg say this yesterday on CNBC) and don’t care to design in ease of use.

I want the first choice to be true but I’m scared it’s the second. That’s not a totally fatal situation, but it certainly means Linux isn’t quite ready for prime time.

My latest install attempts (and they’re ongoing as I type this) will bear this out.

With a new, five year old, laptop (Dell D300XT), an extra hard drive for it and a great deal of curiosity, I set out to make the laptop run Linux. Since this is an extra hard drive, I should be able to swap drives and go back and forth from Windows to Linux without one affecting the other.

Since Red Hat has decided to get out of the consumer desktop end of Linux, I decided to try a new distribution. As I understand it, all Linux versions share certain core components but differ in the other programs that come in the distribution. Suse seemed like a good idea. I had read about it. It has its fans… why not?

The recommended way to install Suse seems to be by installing a small subset of Linux (in my case burning a CD-R) and then using FTP (file transfer protocol) to pluck everything else directly off a server and right onto my hard drive.

If there are detailed… or even sparse… instructions for doing this, I couldn’t find them! The Suse installer started asking questions I had no answer for within the first few seconds of the install. There was no help button to press; nowhere to go. Using Google I was able to get some answers, but every time I’d solve one problem, another would spring up in its place.

Next I went to Debian; another respected distribution. They had a few network install suggestions, but all led to boot disks that were wrong or unavailable.

Finally, I went to Red Hat’s ‘cousin’ Fedora. There’s some sort of incestuous relationship here. I’m not sure what it is, but I think in some way Fedora is part of Red Hat.

I began the installation from 3 CD’s I had downloaded overnight a few days ago. A Linux distribution, even from a cable modem, requires hours and hours of downloading and then burning of bootable ISO CD’s.

Fedora seemed to understand what my system was all about (though it looked like the installation was taking place at 800×600 resolution on my 1024×768 laptop screen). It asked what kind of system I wanted loaded and when I chose ‘desktop’, the loading began.

I’m not sure how long it was… probably around an hour… when Fedora just stopped. A screen, telling me there were four minutes left, stared at me. No motion from the hard drive. No motion from the CD. Nada.

After a while I got tired of waiting and rebooted the system. What I had was nothing. The system wouldn’t boot. Linux wasn’t installed. I have just started the process again.

Maybe I didn’t have enough patience. Maybe the computer was doing some sort of Klingon Mind Meld and didn’t want to be disturbed? How should I know?

Even if this installation is fully successful, my job won’t be done. I’ll need to figure out how to enable my wireless network card, a printer hooked to my router and configure all sorts of computing minutiae, like email parameters.

Right now, it looks like the install will continue long after I’ve gone to bed. Maybe this will give the machine a chance to decide it wants to work this time.

Computer Speed – No Big Deal

A friend, whose company was upgrading its laptops, got me an old PII 300 model. In this gigahertz era, that’s awfully slow. The street value is probably a few hundred bucks, if that much.

Because it was from his business, I agreed to wipe the hard drive clean and then reinstalled Windows 98, its original operating system. After plugging in a wireless network card and adding the drivers, it was time to go to Microsoft’s site to get all the updates and security fixes.

Whose kidding whom? There’s no possible way dial-up users are keeping their software up-to-date. And, the vast majority of high speed at home users are there too.

I downloaded all the Microsoft stuff, Real player, OpenOffice, Spybot Search and Destroy, Dimension4 to keep the clock on time, favoritesync to keep my bookmarks aligned between computers, iespell and pokerstars.com’s client.

They’re all free… though pokerstars can cost you in the long run.

Then I went to the Navas Cable Modem/DSL Tuning Guide and got the registry hack to speed up my broadband access. Finally, I moved the virtual memory to a small disk partition and specified the exact size, which keeps it from fragmenting.

The computer is a champ. There’s little it’s doing that’s not fast enough. I suspect an upgrade from 64 to 128mb of memory will make a some difference, and I have ordered a stick for under $30.

I can’t begin to tell you how often a friend or co-worker will come to me (because I seem to be tech support for most of my friends – except those who are tech support to me) and ask for advice because their computer isn’t fast enough.

Usually, it is fast enough and they’re about to piss away money.

The CPU speed is certainly important, but nowhere as important as most people think. Most Pentium class PCs are totally usable, if you have enough memory (usually very cheap), the right video driver (crucial – and free) and get rid of spyware, malware and the other junk that’s leeching off your limited resources.

So, as I type this up on the ‘big machine’, I’m playing poker on the laptop. Life is good.