This wireless stuff is all well and good, but it’s not something that I would necessarily want to rely on in a case of life-or-death. All too often, the links from more than one of the PCs at home break for no apparent reason. There’s no pattern in it, just one machine or another stops responding.
So it’s back to the wired network, and the subsequent upheavals in the office as I try to find out exactly which of the cables I left from last time connect to what. OK, it might have been sensible to leave them plugged into the client systems, but I genuinely thought I’d be removing them for good – only to find out that I’ve somehow managed to thread them through locations where they simply cannot be removed without ripping all the furniture out, so there are a lot of loose RJ45 connectors lying around.
What will be interesting will be the potential effect moving the router of the main BT socket to an extension cable running off a spur socket. I can expect around 5 Mbit/second at the moment – anything more than a 20% reduction in that will not be acceptable. However, the only way to tell will be to try it, so I suppose it’s time to dig underneath the desks – and hope I have left a power socket free. The good thing is that the wireless link will still work (as well as it ever has) after I move the router, so some testing before final installation should be possible.
Oh, the life-and-death bit? Ever tried battling your way through a Guild Wars instance when the connection drops? I lost a Survivor title when that happened once, and that’s not something I’m inclined to allow again.
