Laptop

Yesterday my new laptop arrived. I didn't think I could *live* without one while I'm out of work. I spent much of the day installing software, configuring it, etc. Since I was at it, I also FINALLY secured my router. It's taken me over two years to do that...

Anyway by the end of the evening, I was completely irritated because I kept losing my wireless connection on my new laptop. At first I was having problems only with GMail, as far as I could tell, but after several other *test* cases, I finally discovered that Google was having it's own issues last night (consistent on all my machines) but I was definitely having intermittent connection issues with my laptop.

So I started searching the web for information on the specific wireless card in my laptop to see if I needed a special configuration for my particular router or if I somehow missed that it has glaring performance issues before I purchased it. I tried every combination of "Dell Wireless 1450 Dual Band WLAN Mini-PCI Card" and problem descriptions that I could think of and couldn't find anything that helped me except other people asking about the same types of issues.

I woke up this morning and started thinking about my router. I don't have a sophisticated network setup. I've never had a router or maintained one over time. I know nothing. But it occurred to me that the issue might not be my card but instead my router ... or rather my card with my router. That prompted me to think about what kind of software is on my router and the fact that it's unlikely it could continue to work with advanced card technology without some upgrades. So I got busy on the Linksys site looking for software upgrades. Finally I found a firmware upgrade for my router.

Now that I've upgraded from 1.40.2 to 1.45.10 firmware, the data transfer is fast. I still seem to be having some intermittent issues where the signal becomes almost non-existent on this laptop and not on my other one. (This was also a pain in the butt because I had to redo all the router configuration work I did yesterday. Why-oh-why can't they store configurations somewhere somehow that they won't be blown away during upgrades?)

Also GMail/GMail Notifier are still having issues. It appears they added a new type of login ala TicketMaster where you have to type in the word in "cursive" on your screen to complete your login. GMail Notifier isn't dealing with that new "feature" gracefully at all. If I use the icon in my status bar to open my gmail box, it hangs while trying to get info from Google and then I end up with every other webpage in the same instance of IE coming back with a "Cannot find server" error. I haven't tried testing other instances to see if that is the problem. Point is, I'm still having intermittent issues and I'm not sure I can attribute it to the GMail/IE state I get into.

I think the first thing I'm going to do today is download Firefox so I can take IE idiosyncracies out of my problem statement. And then I'm going to ignore GMail today so that also isn't feeding into it.