Sorry for the recent lack of updates; as I mentioned on Friday we’ve been rearranging the office, and just to make things even more fun I took the opportunity to reinstall Windows at the same time. Coupled with setting up the wireless router, drilling holes in walls, building new desks, rerouting cables and trying to find a good vantage point for Sully, all while the kitchen’s being rebuilt, it was a manic weekend.

The WRT54G is now set up and running ok, thankfully. Yep, that’s a WRT54G. I ordered the 54GS and they sent me a 54G with a 54GS label and barcode on the outer packaging. I sent this back, and they replaced it with exactly the same thing. I gave up - there wasn’t a fat lot of difference anyway. My sister’s new computer was originally going to be in a different room, hence the wirelessnessness, but as it turned out is now only two metres away from the router. Still, the signal strength is ‘excellent’ It does seem to drop every so often, though, for reasons I haven’t yet figured out. It’s hopefully tight security-wise, as I’ve got some pretty strict filtering and encryption set up. Disappointingly, I could detect no other wireless networks within range to attempt to hack into. Ah well.

As I mentioned above, I reinstalled Windows over the weekend as my system was grinding to a halt. Things are much more smooth now: windows starts up in a reasonable amount of time; shutdown doesn’t take 2.5mins; I have >150mb of ram free during general usage as compared to 40mb before; everything just runs that much faster. It’s been 16 months since I last installed Windows, and given how much I mess around with the internal workings it’s impressive it survived this long, really!