The Linksys router has been installed for several days now and I’ve managed to get all of the PC’s and devices working with it.

The cable modem being at one end of the house and my PC’s being at the other end of the house did cause some problems though. The Vista PC connected OK but the XP PC didn’t connect very well at all. I ended up moving the wireless router to the middle of the house and connected that to the cable modem via a long ethernet cable. Now I just have to hide that cable. The internet radios proved a real pain to get working though.

Neither of them could connect to the router though they could both see it. I did a huge amount of fiddling around with them, though I could not write down all of the steps I took. What was odd was that after a while one of the net radios I got working whilst the other, which is the same make, wouldn’t work at all. Eventually I noticed that the net radio that didn’t work was using an older version of firmware, so updated that to a newer version of the firmware than was on the working net radio, and eventually got that working. Then of course the net radio that worked before stopped working, so I upgraded the firmware on that net radio. Now both are working OK.

In fact they are working better than OK as I know have the option of listening to BBC On Demand radio programmes. I think this is part of the BBC’s iPlayer functionality. The firmware upgrade knows about the iPlayer but access’s just the available On Demand radio programmes.

I’ve listened to a few of the On Demand programmes and whereas when you listen to a normal radio station they broadcast at 64kbps, which is good enough for speech, the On Demand programmes broadcast from 64kbps and back down to sometimes as low as 6kbps (Eh! Ed). None of these kbps are hi-fidelity, or anywhere near it, but for listening to speech on a little radio then 64 or even 32kbps are just about OK. Below that and its hopeless. I don’t know why this happens but I’m pretty sure it’s not something I can control as when it does fluctuate downwards then I don’t think I’m having any bandwidth problems. It maybe just that the BBC’s iPlayer servers are being swamped and it just starts streaming what it can in a desperate attempt at providing sound and vision to everyone. The iPlayer seems to have become popular with a lot of people recently so I’d imagine that everyone who has a download cap is going to run into that soon.

I suppose the next batch of testing will be with just a single PC connected to the net and see how fast I can actually download some huge files.

I exchanged the Belkin Wireless router for a Netgear RangeMax router which was Vista compatible. I installed the router software OK on the Vista laptop and that worked fine even when I disconnected the ethernet cable.

The Netgear router came with it’s own USB Range Max adapter so I installed that on the XP desktop PC. Physically next to that PC is the newer Vista desktop PC and that is still using a very basic Belkin USB adapter. These PC’s are at the other end of the house from the cable modem and Netgear wireless router. I expected the broadcast range of the wireless modem to cover the whole of the house, just like it showed on the cover of the routers box. And did it? Sort of, just. The Vista PC with the old Belkin USB adapter gets a reliable but not very fast connection. The XP machine with the Netgear Range Max USB adapter disconnects all the time. This is the wrong way round.

I did disconnect the Range MAX adapter from the XP machine and plugged back in its old Belkin USB adapter and ran its software but it was just as flaky. I got a 45 foot ethernet cable and plugged that into the back of the XP machine and connected that to the router, before I remembered that XP doesn’t think I have an ethernet adapter. I got fed up with that recurring problem and having backed everything up in triplicate I have run the system restore disk to get all the hardware working again. That will finish some day soon.

I did some research and to get coverage over the whole house I’m going to have to get a G+ MIMO router and do a second exchange of the router. I did warn the shop that if it didn’t work I’ll return it and they agreed. Hardly any of the greater range and faster routers run on Vista, only XP. Hence the restore of the XP machine.

I also decided that the laptop with Vista Ultimate, with an installed SP1 on it, and that runs like a dog can also get reacquianted with its system restore disc, so ran that. That restored pretty quick and the machine does run a lot faster with XP on it than with Vista Ultimate SP1. Ran Windows Update and that found 72 updates to install and most of them did go on OK before a couple failed.

Swapped the Netgear router for a Linksys Wireless G with Rangebooster, which again is not Vista compatible, and now that I have at least 1 PC with XP on it, the other is still restoring, I can have a go at installing that and see if I do get the range that they promise. If that doesn’t work I’ll have to go with 802.11n, but I’m not sure if it’s backward compatible. If it’s not then I’ll need to get several expensive 802.11n USB adapters and no doubt another kettle of fish will be opened, like the Internet radios won’t work. Such fun. 

The cable modem was installed this morning and worked straight away on the Vista laptop. In fact it was installed so quick after ordering that I haven’t even received any documentation on the DNS or mail servers or any other setup stuff through the regular mail yet.

TV programs seemed to be loaded within seconds but as there’s squat else on the laptop I couldn’t check much else, well I suppose I could have downloaded a movie with bittorrent but I thought I’d do all that kind of testing on the 2 desktop PC’s. I got a Belkin cable DSL router in the afternoon and followed the instructions to install the software first. I disabled the wireless connection on the laptop then ran setup for the router. The first thing it tried to do was to talk to the cable modem, and it failed. Turned off the Defender firewall, eventually, but setup could still not talk to the router. Rebooted everything and still no joy.

Then I thought I’d have a look at the small print and realised that the router wasn’t Vista compatible. Vista could see the cable modem but the router software couldn’t. OK, lets try the router software, which is XP compatible, with the XP desktop PC. As the cable modem is in the TV room and the XP PC is in a room about 40 feet away I had to move the XP PC to the TV room first. Did that and did it work. No. Seems that the XP PC’s ethernet port is not working, well not as far as XP’s Device Manager is concerned.

Ho-bloody-hum. The best laid plans…………. OK tomorrow the Vista incompatible cable router goes back to the shop and I get a Vista compatible version.