So with my Roadrunner connection and my computer at opposite ends of the house and a floor apart, I haven’t been getting the best wireless throughput. After fiddling endlessly with antenna positioning, channel selection, and so on I decided I just needed MORE POWER (cue Tim Allen’s monkey grunt).
So I took down my (damn unique!) Sony router and access point and popped for a brand-freakin-new Belkin N1 router. That’s right N1, baby – none of that pre-N stuff for me. It wasn’t cheap, but nothing I buy is (hey, I’m lamenting here, not bragging!). It’s a slick little unit I must say. I spent nearly a full day hooking it all back up, reconfiguring everything to WPA instead of my previous WEP (that was long overdue), and positioning antennas and such. Netstumbler was a big help in optimizing the setup and in knowing which channels the neighbors are on so I could avoid them.
I went from a “good”, occasional 48/36/24bps to a pretty constant “excellent”, 54bps connection. The lag in online games isn’t entirely gone, but really damn good. My in-game pings are back down to sub-50 for the most part. All this and I didn’t even upgrade the cheap usb wireless adapter on the desktop to a new one with MIMO. Nice to know there’s more room for improvement (if I ever want to spend another $100 that is).
Plus if you want to pop some corn, you only need to hold the bag in the air.
Tags: Comp hardware / mods
