I’m starting to notice some odd things happening with Vista (And you thought you’d left all that behind with XP. Ed). I tried downloading the Office 2007 ‘plug-in’ that allows you to save a document as a PDF, and though the software downloaded, it didn’t install. Just sat there morosely doing diddly-squat till I clicked on the cancel control.

Also Vista keeps reminding me that it needs to install a Belkin wireless adapter driver. The Vista PC is actually connected to the router with an Ethernet cable, and when I need a good connection on the XP PC then it gets the Ethernet cable, so the Belkin driver is needed on Vista when that happens. The first time I tried installing it it sat there for 20 minutes again doing nothing before I cancelled it. I think I ended up having to reboot. When I did all I got was a dark screen, Vista would not start. Restarted and it wanted to run a restore. Which I let it. The other day I tried again to install the Belkin driver and this time nothing happened and I was able to cancel it.

I also have trouble with iTunes in that sometimes when it starts it doesn’t connect to the net, and does it take a long time before I get any notice why. Eventually it tells me that the Bonjour service isn’t running. I did think that this might be connected to the fact that recently I have been using Synctoy to backup the iTunesmusic folder and as that took so long, the first time I ran it, and it was obviously reading the iTunesmusic folder, maybe both apps trying to access the same folder at the same time resulted in some kind of deadlock and Bonjour switching itself off out of a sense of pique. The trouble with this thinking is that I’m getting the Bonjour service problem even when I’m not using Synctoy and haven’t even in that logged in session.

If I go to Services to switch on the Bonjour service I always find that it shows ‘Started’ anyway. Hmm… When I then come out of Services iTunes has picked itself up and is invariably syncing up podcasts or downloading iPhone app upgrades. Seems that just opening up Services is enough to scare Bonjour into kicking itself into gear.

Another app that didn’t install to well was Synctoy itself. I think that originally resulted in a restore. Sounds like everything is tickety-boo in Windows land then.

Give me strength.

My cable modem/wireless internet connection on both my XP and Vista PC’s kept disconnecting so I’ve ended up using the ethernet cable. Hardly wireless ferchrissakes.

With the ethernet cable connection I usually get a 15-19mbps connection and with the flaky XP and Vista wireless connections I was getting between 3-5mbps. That is such a huge difference in speed I thought I’d better see if there were any upgrades for the Belkin wireless adapter drivers, for both machines. First I upgraded the XP PC and when I tested that connection speed I got at least 7mbps.

Then when I went to upgrade the Vista’s Belkin drivers I realised that the driver disk I used was a couple of years old and almost certainly not Vista compatible. It was a miracle it connected to the internet at all. I installed a Vista driver for the adapter and re ran the speed test and now I’m getting, an occasional connection speed of 15mbps, and usually at least 7mbps. Result.

I got an email from an agent the other day about a position not very far from where I live and spoke to him about it immediately. Apparently I was the first person to phone him about the position. I asked him how many people he’d emailed about the position and the answer was 1,500. I asked him about that and what kind of responses he got and he said he gets a lot of emails from a lot of annoyed people as job specs don’t match the clients. I bet they use some software where you punch in a couple of IT acronyms, hit the send control and everyone that contains a couple of the acronyms on their resume gets an email.

Fancied doing some geek reading and have just bought Secrets of RSS by Steve Holzner, Head Rush Ajax by Brett Mclaughlin and a Dummies book on WordPress.   

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.