Saturday, October 19, 2002
Just got ADSL installed, and a wireless network in the flat. Cool. However, in the spirit of every silver lining having a dark cloud over it, here's a few opaque condensations..
- Installed a PCMCIA wireless card on my laptop -- which promptly blue screened, rebooting several times, until I ejected the card. For some reason I had a Windows 2000 version of a dll, just one of them, that made the installer install the wrong GUI dll and other bits of the card driver. Still not sure I've got all the right bits there.. DLL hell, I hate windows for it. A friend suggested going to XP to solve that issue:
- That's a cop-out
- Don't want to upgrade my flakey OS to another MS one that'll involve dodgy EULA's. More likely to convert it to some Linux distro..
- I've only got 128MB RAM on this baby, XP would kill it, it's slow enough as it is..
- Now I've got the card working, I had a bit of a mare getting the network routing table to ignore the docking station's ethernet card, and use the wireless card to contact the lan instead. Must buy a decent IP book sometime. All the web pages I found either didn't help much or only used the NT version of
route. - ADSL: got an email from my ISP saying anytime up until 6pm. Spent ALL day checking the line. No change. Couldn't someone have told me the phone would still work? Still not sure how it's all working -- does the phone's limited signal response just auto filter? Dunno. Nice speed up for downloads though.. just got to find some of the hallowed broadband content we keep getting told about.
- Speaking of which... BBCi Broadband. Only available to certain ISPs! Eh, haven't they heard about the net? How it works? Sent them a strongly, ahem, worded feedback rant. This is from their FAQ:
Why do I need to sign up to a particular service provider to access BBCi Broadband?
The BBC intends to expand the list of availability to include as many UK broadband service providers as mobiles. Please check availability with your broadband service provider. [BBCi FAQ]
What tosh.
