Two steps forward, one step back

I’m seriously considering reverting to a wired network.  Not intending to drop the wifi entirely, but it seems that it doesn’t present the stability and reliability that I’ve come to expect.

A large part of this is down to the adaptors and aerials used by the system.  Of course, no two devices are from the same manufacturer, so I can’t really expect complete integration without problems.  Come to think of it, no two devices are actually running on the same platform (Win XP, Vista, 7, Mobile 6, and whatever variant of Linux is running on the actual router).  I suppose it’s a miracle that they manage to talk at all.

It’s not that connections to the router show any difficulties (apart from the USB stick wifi adaptor on the Win XP box – but that seems to fall out of the USB port if you even glance at it – this takes the concept of quick release to new heights).  But I also need to copy data between devices, and this is where it falls down.  Speeds are nothing short of appalling, less than the broadband link  would be expected to support, and without a properly managed DHCP/DNS on a server, even finding the other boxes can be tricky.

So do I really want to return to the rat’s nest of cables stuffed behind desks and book cases?  No, but I may not have the choice.  Unless I can sort out a no-cost (and most especially no-extra-box) solution, it will have to be back to wires everywhere.

The real negative, though, is going to be that the router will have to move.  It’s currently connected directly into the BT master socket, for best broadband performance.  But the no-extra-box constraint means that I can’t use a switch in the study, so the router will have to move up there and serve, with a likely drop in WAN access speeds.  And that’s not something that I really want to see happening.

Feature bloat

You know what it’s like – a nice new PC, all shiny, loads of disk space.  Then three days later it’s all slow, fragmented, and you start to think that maybe the old system wasn’t that bad after all.

Well, that’s the situation here.  The brand new 120 GB disk in my new netbook (has that term been trademarked?  If so, I’m in trouble – along with maybe nearly everyone else who has written anything on the web in the last six months) is now no longer showing 120 GB of free space.

OK, I put the Technet Windows 7 beta on it – whoops, there goes well over 7 GB free space in the OS folder alone.  Then there’s everything MS loads by default into Program Files.  Plus 4.5 GB of pagefile and hiberfil.sys.

Then I started. There are all the default things, like Acrobat Reader, Irfanview, Java etc.  The whole of the Windows Live suite – or at least, all the useful bits – like Live Writer!  Now it started getting out of hand: Silverlight, Digiguide, Filezilla, KeePass, Notepad++.  Anything else?  Yes, Live Sync!  After all, why waste disk space on one PC when you can waste it on two or more?  What was surprising was that so far, the Program Files folder was still only around 1 GB in size

The final straw was Guild Wars – on its own, this doubled the Program Files folder.  However, this isn’t the worst of it: I can afford the disk space, it’s the fact that GW will probably take up all the time I’m likely to save with the new system.  Ah, the perils of new technology.

PANs and POTS

Bluetooth on a mobile phone is an amazing invention - wireless headsets and hands-free calling alone would make it worthwhile.  However, for over a year I've had no luck at getting it to work as a modem for my various laptops.

Until today.  The new netbook, with a bit of tweaking and twisting, is now making L2TP connections via bluetooth and the ORBIT2, and thence via O2's network, all the way to the company network.  This has bugged me for so long, and now it's working!

The real answer lay in using Internet Connection Sharing on the phone - I could easily get the PC to see the phone, but never had any way of getting info in and out.  This last step fixed that.  Naturally, it isn't necessarily that easy - the bluetooth settings on the laptop take a bit of getting the head around, but I have satisfied myself that the functionality is reproducible.

The worst bit, so far, is the absolutely appalling lag - ping times in the 400-600 ms range mean that anything like a complex web page is going to load very slowly.  At that sort of rate, I'd almost be better with an old 300 baud modem on a POTS line.