Wifi? No thank you

06/02/12 14:43

My computer is old.

When I say it’s old, I mean it’s relatively old. One of my harddrives is nearly a decade old, and the other gave out during my first year of uni. I only upgraded from DDR2 to DDR3 RAM sticks just before Christmas last year (or was it just after we came back? Dates get a bit fuzzy sometimes). None of the components are spectacular, although I do have Richard’s old motherboard, graphics card and CPU, which he bought for gaming only three years ago. They’re not great, but they’re not fabulous. But they serve my purpose.

Unfortunately, one of the things I’ve always had to rely on with this piece of – well, I say junk lovingly – was the network adapter. Yep: I’m oldschool and I use a cable to connect to the internet. Why? Twofold:

  1. I don’t trust wifi. It can be flaky. It doesn’t always work. Besides, a cable is faster. It, like, goes straight through and doesn’t get intercepted by the air, or something. (I’m not a huge techy person, can you tell?)
  2. I don’t trust our wifi.

I think it’s that second point that’s the most valid here. Like a lot of people in Bristol, we’re on Virgin, and we’re supposed to get 50Mb connections. Again, I don’t know the details, I’m not hugely techy. But I do know we don’t get those speeds, that we aren’t expected to get those speeds (because we can only get “up to” 50Mb), and that neither my laptop, mobile and desktop, when connected over wifi, can get anywhere near the speeds we’re meant to get.

I know that the wifi just drops out spontaneously. I know that the speeds are dreadful and if I so much as breathe in the direction of my wireless adapter then I can forget about connecting to the internet for a week.

It didn’t seem so bad when my network adapter gave out on Thursday, because Richard brought a wireless adapter around in its stead. That worked for a short while, on Friday evening, but then it stopped recognising the network altogether. Possibly the card’s fault? At least, that’s what I assume, since I can still connect to the internet over wifi on my laptop, even if it is a tenuous link.

So I’ve had to resort to using my laptop for a while. I’m lucky enough that my beautiful, darling Dell laptop has a …. an ethernet port? Is that what it’s called? Yeah, it’s got one of those, so I can just plug my cable right in. It makes for a rather messy desk, not to mention the fact that I don’t have the space to put my tablet and do some drawing, and I have to have my computer on simultaneously to listen to music (as I need the soundcard on the mobo in the computer to use those speakers).

On the plus side (again), Richard then went on to order a new network adapter for my computer. That’s currently sitting on my desk here, at work, in a box that I can’t open because I don’t have any scissors (d’oh!). So I’m assuming it’s what I want it to be. He says I ought to try and plug it in myself, but I don’t have any screwdrivers of my own, I’ve never done it on my own before, and I’d rather do it with him there to say “DON’T DO THAT YOU’RE GOING TO EXPLODE THE UNIVERSE” or something.

And before yesterday, he would probably have scoffed that I wouldn’t do something liket hat. But I did kinda throw our dinner all over the floor yesterday afternoon, so hey, anything can happen.

In the meantime, I’ll just stick to my laptop, and use the cable with that until Friday. There are worse things that I could get lumped with. I could be using that stupid Vodafone 3G stick in the hospital again. Or I might not have a laptop at all. (A laptop that has the samei nternet speed when I’m sitting right next to the router as when I’m sitting in my bedroom upstairs.)

I might not have the internet. Then where the heck would I be?!

Filed under: Personal, The Girl by Sophie

  • http://daneden.me Dan Eden

    Ah, Virgin. Supplying below-par routers since 2010. I remember it well.

    The thing is, Virgin & Netgear signed an exclusivity deal together. Netgear would produce routers for Virgin Media for a low cost, provided that Virgin don’t use anyone else’s routers for x years. Not bad eh? Netgear make some pretty good stuff.

    However, these routers were built for Virgin’s lowest benchmark fibre optic speeds – something in the 10mb region. So they specced the routers to deal with no more that 2 or 3 computers & devices. This means if you so much as even connect more than 4 devices to the wireless router, it simply ceases to function.

    We dealt with this firsthand in my student house last year – 8 boys, each with a computer and a current-generation gaming console. So essentially a minimum of 16 wireless devices. Chaos! We ended up with 3 bridge routers placed around the house.

    If you can talk to the Virgin bods and get a standalone modem and buy your own router, you definitely should.

    • http://herbal-jazz.net Sophie

      One of my housemates has his own router. Unfortunately, I don’t know the first damn thing about any of that sort of stuff! Thanks for the background info on it all, though, I didn’t know that and it makes a lot of sense – especially as we’ve got four regular computer users in my house, one of whom connects using his own router, but three of whom have a desktop and a laptop regularly connected.

      So that sort of makes sense!

      I might be able to get my own router, but might not. Does this affect cabled connections? I sometimes have pretty slow internet even when connected using the cable, but I don’t really know enough to make an educated guess.

      Either way, maybe I can badger that one housemate to phone up Virgin – at least he knows what he’s on about :-)

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