Don’t worry – back to normal programming tomorrow.

Last weekend I spent a day updating drivers and trying to get my netbook’s wireless card operating normally. Because I am always streaming music to my airport express, I need the netbook to operate as efficiently as possible, without any kind of hiccups or other network issues that would cause skips in playback.

Unfortunately, there has always been the occasional drop-out due to network interruptions, and I could count on a sudden pause in playback once every twenty minutes or so. So anyway, I got sick of it last weekend and started digging around.

Turns out there are a lot of netbooks out there, and a lot of people have been working on the same problems. Through a lot of research I was able to update the drivers to my wireless router, and also I updated my netbook’s wireless card driver. The old driver showed a link speed of 150 Mbps (running at 802.11n) but new drivers that I installed showed a link speed of only 54 Mbps, which is half the speed of what I expect from a 802.11n network. In the past that meant that I would throw out the driver and roll back to the old one, hoping for more speed.

As it turns out, the new drivers are actually much better. Even though the link speed shows as slower in windows, I have completely gotten rid of the drop outs, and music is playing smoothly. It isn’t perfect – but now I get a drop out maybe once every few days – and that is much better than before.

So the moral of the story is that sometimes the link speed isn’t the best measure of how things are going, and the first rule of smooth hardware operation is: update your drivers.

OK – geek talk over. Regular talk commences tomorrow.