Don’t worry – back to normal programming tomorrow.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
OK – geek talk over. Regular talk commences tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,37,38,39],"class_list":["post-1696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-airport-express","tag-computer","tag-music","tag-nerd"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-rm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1696\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}