Friday, April 30, 2010

My "Linksys" experience and fantastic fix all done the hard way...

This all started out with my second computer and continued onto the point where I had 4 or even 5 online all the time sharing the connection.

At first there was one family share computer but after just two weeks in that kind of hell I decided we needed at least two online. That did nothing but add to the fighting because instead of four people fighting with one all at once for the computer there were now three fighting with two all at once and all the time.

If you do the math then you'll count person A fighting over a computer with persons B, C, D & E. That's just four constant fights, and adding a computer should cut that fighting down 40 to 50%, but it didn't because of a few errors in my reasoning. One thing I had never considered is that people can and will fight with two people at the same time, another was people have legs and can move quickly from one computer to another and back and forth and back and forth endlessly. So now I had person A fighting with persons C, D & E, and I also had person B fighting with persons C, D & E for now two computers. Instead of four ongoing and endless fights I now had six. Now to fix even that I bought three more computers, 5 matching N.I.C. cards and a shit load of wire with the connector pliers and ends kit and a four port networking hub.

I bought all NetGear pci lan cards (to make configuration easier and this screwed up left and right. Turned out I had to manually reset the 10/100 lan cards down to 50 MB, or 1/2 the speed and still the hub acted up on me. No now after 75 plus hours in two weeks going over and over I threw out the NetGear hub and bought a LinkSys. This helped a great deal but one computer had to take turns at being offline and the damn wires were getting moved all around everywhere. So.... I called those great folks at TigerDirect and they helped me go wireless.

I couldn't find the picture of the actual wireless pci cards I bought but I think they were the G50 series and they were great except those antennas sucked and kept falling off of every one of them.

More on the fix after I explain these damn pictures. I need to do it this way because I'm already confused myself and this might be the best way to tell you about my solution.

(This one looks similar to my LinkSys card except the
antennea was much more flimsy and cheaper quality.)


(This antenna is similar to the ones on mine. Note the
three movable joints where it connects because there
is
also a 4th that moves directly where it is attached)

(This is my first wireless router, this thing was awesome. Even
with the antennas busted off I got a great signal anywhere over
4 acres and across from one house to my other one, in my work
shop and garage. I lost that one when my house burnt down last
February and replaced it with a*cough-Cough "better one"

(This is my better one. I got it at Walmart for only $79. I knew
I paid high for it but I bought it mostly because LinkSys had
treated me so well for more than the last 12 years. I thought
I knew I could trust them, but this time LinkSys told me to pay
them for support or go F**K myself, so I just gave the piece of
crap away for free and bought a better NetGear from TigerDirect
for "get this..." $20, and brand new too...)

Now the last of this story and the fix-it tip...

All of my LinkSys cards had broken antennas. Soldering pieces of wire wouldn't help, nothing worked until tonight.

I took a broken female power connector from a plug for a CD-Rom drive and cut it off my power supply. It turned out not to be soldered, only crimped on to the wire (possibly why it broke to begin with) and noticed that I had potentially both the female and male ends still on the single piece of connector, I also noticed that the inside diameter of the male end was hollow, rigid and almost the exact inside diameter as the pci cards antenna feed wire so that it would make a perfect plug on female attachment to join onto that very short piece of wire and deep enough to grasp it firmly almost the whole length of it. The other end of that clip was the real female connection end designed to connect to the power in to the CD-Rom. It also fit firmly to about a 12" ling piece of tightly twisted speaker wire. I stripped the whole length and soldered it into the connector and had a decent antenna but it was flimsy and begging to short out on some part of the chassis. So to cure that I wrapped the wire around a length of silver solder wire and this allowed me to bend it and form it in any direction to keep it safely away from any ground. Next I hooked it up and fired up the PC expecting I had wasted my time and feeling foolish but that's not what I got outta the deal. I'm running a steady connection speed of 100.0 Mbps, Packets both sent and received verify that it is not giving stats on the network but on the connection to the internet only (other reason I know is because only my motherboards lan card is networked, not the wireless on this machine

Short version is I have a steady increase of 91% in actual counted transfer value (LOL), I checked it three times on calculator and once in my head. Came up with 50% using whole count using even numbers reduced and then only odd fraction left, then with remainder reflecting 41%, both combined came to 91%. Sounds like a strange math technique but for over 30 years that method has shown near complete accuracy in figuring concrete, volume, costs combined and almost undefinable general mass equivalents.



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