Friday 14 March 2008

Things to do on your day off #1 - Reconfigure Your Network

Around this time last year I invested in a cheap-and-cheerful Dynamode BR-6004 Wireless Router and a LinkSys wireless PCI network card. This was to allow my children to access the internet from their bedroom without me having to run cables through the house.

The downside to this was the built-in four port hub. For some reason there was a noticeable delay when accessing the internet when directly wired in to the hub. This meant that for browsing the web the my kids PC felt faster than the directly wired one.

I'd never found a way around this, but as the actual download speeds were OK it was something I was willing to put up with.

There were some other issues with the router. One of them was that you had to run Internet Explorer in order to configure the modem. FireFox or Konqueror just wouldn't work correctly with it.

None of this was reason enough to ditch it so I've stuck with it, albeit slightly annoyed that the kids had a better browsing experience than I did, and I was paying for the damn thing!

Last week however a colleague gave me a second hand SiteCom WL-025 Wireless Router that he no longer wanted. Although on paper it should be a worse router than the Dynamode one, in practice it works a damn site better. The network delay has gone, network encryption works better (even if it supports less protocols), the web configuration works with Firefox, and the network connection speed appears faster too.

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