Category: Revelation

That was relatively painless.

My Belkin router has needed rebooting twice in the last two weeks in order to restore wireless connectivity. I’ve experienced this before – I’ve had 4 or 5 routers before, and every one of them (except both Linksys, which were dead as soon as I got them) has, after a year or so, gotten to the point where it needs frequent rebooting. The rebooting gets more and more frequent, until eventually I give up and replace the damn thing.

For some strange reason, I decided to give Linksys another chance, but this time I decided to pay a few extra bucks and buy it from the local Staples. That way, if and when it craps out, I can take it back. Providing it behaves like every other Linksys I’ve bought, and is noticably faulty in the first 14 days.

I plugged it in, and set it up as a copy of the existing one. Even copied the MAC address. Unplugged the existing one, plugged this in, rebooted both the router and the cable modem, and the new router got the same IP as the old one had (thank goodness) and everything seemed to be working exactly the same. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Need a new graphics card

(Yeah, I know I haven’t been posting much. Mostly because the sort of stuff that’s bugging me right now doesn’t need to be shared with the entire web.)

I did the Ultimate Boot CD diagnostics that I wrote about in this previous post. And DFT said nothing was wrong with the drive, several memory and CPU testers found nothing wrong with either of them. And of course, I still have that message about the video card. So I’m thinking it’s almost certainly the video card.

I have an old ATI of some form or another in my desk drawer at work (I tried to give it to somebody there but he decided he wanted something with a driver disk and a manual). I think I’ll bung that in and give it a try, see if the system manages to stay up. If it does, I’ll try the old disk as well, to see if the problems with it were just a matter of needing a chkdisk or scandisk after all those power cycles. If that’s the case, I need to buy a decent but cheap AGP video card. My only two criteria are that it must be cheap (I think I mentioned that already) and it must give a decent frame rate in Half Life 2.

I feel better about that decision

Friday I agonized over the weather decision. Today the TAF (Terminal Aerodrome Forecast) is calling for fairly strong gusty winds – nothing I haven’t dealt with before, but not conducive to passenger comfort – and the FA (Area Forecast) is mentioning widely scattered thunderstorms. The surface analysis map shows a not too wide or strong line of showers approaching, but a strong occluded front and a very low Low right behind it, so who knows what might be popping up during the day. So yeah, I probably wouldn’t have been happy with myself if I’d flown Vicki up here, knowing we’d be dealing with all that turbulence on the way home.

Yesterday and early this morning there was a lot of wind shear in the forecast – David Megginson comments on it (in context of Watertown’s forecast, which was similar to Rochester’s) over on his blog. It appears that whatever weather mechanism was making strong winds just above the ground yesterday is extending down to the ground today.