Multimedia Headache Central

My eMachine computer, receiver and television. Actually I might just get rid of the DVD player as the computer has a DVD player. Note the keyboard and mouse to the right of the center speaker.

This may not be an authorized photo from my wife, we'll see after I post it!

Partial Geek Success

When we got rid of our fixed line ADSL package and went for the wireless dongle I figured no problem, I'll hook it up to our main computer and share out the connection, or so I thought.

Not to get into real deep geek speak, I'll just say that our main computer did not like going from a fresh reinstall to XP Service Pack 3. Fact is I found knowledge base article from Microsoft attesting to my problems are from the Service Pack, that I can't uninstall. So I couldn't use our main computer to share out the connection, for now I would try my netbook.

It took two frustrating nights of trying but I finally nailed it, having to give my other computer a static IP address on its wifi adapter as it wasn't picking one up from the netbook.

Amazingly I am getting 384kb on the shared computer, which isn't bad. The main thing I need to do is test the Skype call quality.

So for you geeks that want to know how to share out your laptop/netbook's wifi connection here is how I did it:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/setup/adhoc.mspx

Multi Media = Multi Headaches

Ever since I have received all of the parts to make my multimedia center, things haven't exactly fallen into place.

The video card installed easily enough but there are some annoying pop up error when the computer starts. I found the fix on a forum, just need to get around to it.

The wireless antennae was a little buggy at first but after downloading the latest drivers it has been doing a great job.

I have hardly any hard drive space. I used to think of that as totally unnecessary, but now that I have taken up downloading certain files, I realized how quickly hard drive space fills up.

Initially I setup my computer in one of the side compartments in the entertainment center, problem was some of the cords were to short and they stretched this way and that. It looked like spaghetti and I decided the thing to do was move it closer the receiver. So I disconnected everything and moved it closer to the receiver, big mistake. The receiver by itself generates a good amount of heat, the computer generates a good amount of heat, put them in the same compartment and I have an oven! Time for Plan "C" and move it again.

My ADSL broadband, fugget about it. I put in a request to have it disconnected.

The Upgrade Downgrade - Epilogue

Ever since our ADSL broadband service has been upgraded there has been one small problem, it hadn't been upgraded. I checked our router and it showed 4MB service (Although we didn't request that) but our results were closer to dial up speeds. When I checked our line speed online, I was right, it was closer to dial up speeds, in some cases even slower!

I did what I should have done a long time ago. I walked across the street to the cell phone store and in less than 10 minutes had purchases a USB wireless device with 1+MB download speeds already activated and ready to go. The neat thing about this is we can use it anywhere in Sri Lanka.

I brought it home, installed the software and instant 1-1.5MB line speed. Here we waited well over a month to get our ADSL upgraded, only to have it get times worse, where we now have wireless broadband for less than half the monthly rate we were going to pay. Incredible.

It's going to be interesting to see how long it will take to have our broadband disconnected from the phone company. That and there is no way we are going to pay for a 4MB line that delivered dial up speeds!