March 31, 2005
How Do You Spell Netgear Router Relief? L-I-N-K-S-Y-S
04:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ PC - General
Posts have been a bit slow over the past few days. In fact, there have been no posts. Why? A little Netgear WGT624 (v2) router melt down.
The original problem with the router was very mysterious. It seemed to work fine, but I was having intermittent problems connecting to this site (Zoinger.com). Eventually, I couldn’t connect at all. My browser would just time out.
Of course, I thought this was my host’s (1and1) fault. A call to them indicated that this was not the case. Next up, Charter Communications, my cable modem supplier. Nope, they could get to Zoinger.com no problemo, but they did suggest that it might be the router.
WTF? The router. No waaay. However, by this time, about 5-6 hours worth of debugging time, I was getting desperate. I removed the router from my set up and… low and behold, I could get to Zoinger.com.
Indeed, it was the router causing the problem. I searched on Netgear’s “support” site (what a joke), and could find no reference to this issue. I then tried downgrading the firmware to an old version to no avail. Then I found this post on the Netgear forum site. 19 pages of people having a similar problem with no official response from Netgear.
I’ve owned routers from Sonicwall, SMC and Cisco and have never had a problem with any of them. My Netgear router has had problems from day one (it really doesn’t like renewing the dynamic IP address and would hang all the time requiring a reboot).
So how is Netgear router relief spelled? Linksys WRT54G… the damn router I should have purchased in the first place.
P.S. I wish I would have used Skype when I called Netgear’s technical support line. The router has a pretty cool feature to automatically upgrade the firmware. However, during an upgrade in my debugging process the router hung which ended up frying it. Anyway, the tech support person asked me why I would use the feature… implying that you really shouldn’t. OMG, it’s only the first thing you see when you boot into the admin screen, and it is all the time asking you if you want to upgrade when a new firmware version comes out. Classic!
March 25, 2005
Moving from a PC to a Mac
07:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ PC - General
Doug Kaye, the creator of ITConversations, recently moved from a PC (Windows XP) to a Mac (OSX). He wrote up a status report of what he thought about the process and what he likes about the Mac. For example,
One other thing that blew me away: When you start OS X for the first time, you’re asked if you want to move from another Mac. I’ve been using an iBook – which will now become my wife’s as a replacement for her XP box – so I said yes. One Firewire connection and 20 minutes later, and everything I cared about on the iBook, including all of my personal configurations, was moved to the PowerBook.
Deeaammn. Try doing that with a PC. Not!
March 20, 2005
MobilePC's History of the Laptop (aka, Notebook)
09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ PC - General
MobilePC last week published The Birth of the Notebook, an extensive article looking at the birth and evolution of the laptop/notebook computer. The article spans from 1975 with IBM’s 5100 “portable” computer to today’s offerings such as the OQO. Some pretty good reading.
The article offers up some juicy bits like:
NEC also has the honor of claiming one of the industry’s most boneheaded moves: It dropped the UltraLite name in favor of “Versa,” and ultralight quickly became a generic term for small notebooks.
Hum… I wonder if this would fit on one of those airline tray tables?
