Recently, my wife kept complaining that her computer had problems with wireless Internet access, very frequently like once every few minutes. She kept having to disconnect and connect her wireless connection in order to gain the Internet access. I checked it out and found that the connection to the wireless router was OK but the computer kept losing the DNS (Domain Name Server). In other words, it lost the ability to look up the IP address for the domain names (like yahoo.com, google.com) on the browser. It’s like losing the Internet Directory. When I forced the DNS IP directly using Google’s public DNS (8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4) into the wireless network adapter, it worked perfectly. Somehow, the router, as the DHCP server and network gateway, was no longer able to provide the exact IP address. I originally suspect her wireless adapter must have a down-rev driver so I downloaded and installed the latest driver. And then I uninstalled Lenovo’s ReadComm since it’s often the troublemaker based on my Google search. Neither of the above two fixed the problem. What’s going on?

My router is D-Link DIR-615. Over a month ago, I also noticed that it would occasionally behave the same way even for my wired connected desktop. But the problem went away after I manually programmed Google’s DNS into the router instead of using Comcast’s (my ISP’s) DNS. I figured Comcast’s DNS must have been gone offline. This time, my wired connection has no DNS problem but my wife’s computer via wireless network does. This forced me to suspect the router must be the problem.

I decided to upgrade the firmware to the latest (3.13NA) but the problem got even worse. Now my wired connection was behaving the same way. I suspected now all the firmware upgrades must have caused the internal variables to be wrongly initialized because I was saving and restoring the configuration file to save me from the trouble of customizing the router. Based on my experience working with computer BIOS and firmware, the firmware set up a certain memory space for the “constants” used for program execution. If it’s not set up correctly as each successive version of firmwares may have used different memory spaces, the firmware would do some strange things.

After restoring the router’s “factory defaults,” which essentially re-initialize the “constants” memory spaces, the router seemed to be working as expected. Hopefully, this is the end of a long struggle working with a “cheap” but capable router.

The lesson learned is that it’s best to trust the “factory defaults,” as they are often the optimal ones since it’s how it’s been tested or QA’ed.

Fry’s was having a sale last weekend on PNY’s 2GB SO-DIMM ($23-$10 Rebate). So I bought one and tried to replace the existing 1GB SO-DIMM that came with the unit.

First I powered down the system, followed by removing the power and the battery to make sure nothing “hot” during installation. Then all I needed to do was to unscrew the two screws on the bottom and “slide” out the cover. That was easy.

But upon reboot, it failed to recognize the additional memory even after a couple of reboots. So I got into the BIOS screen (F2 key upon power up) and verified the BIOS has recognized the 2GB DIMM. Then the computer registered 2GB of memory. It appears that the BIOS does not “explore” additional memory space automatically without going into the BIOS setup screen. I updated the BIOS just in case I have a down level BIOS.

All is well now. I don’t know if the net $14 investment was worth it since Windows XP Home works fine with 1GB of DIMM and I usually just check emails and browse nets, which normally does not require a lot of memory. But there will be some rare occasion when I need the extra memory….

Having access to Sun’s Sunray running on Solaris 10 and my Windows XP Pro PC requires me to have a USB switch to switch the keyboard/mouse back and forth between the input to the Laptop and the Sunray device. With Synergy, there is no need to use the USB switch. The mouse cursor can move between the two screens seamlessly with the added benefit of sharing the copy/past clipboard. The only complication is that the Solaris binary would need to be compiled from the source code. The compilation went smoothly but one must pay attention to the doc/compiling.html which indicates that you need to add the following to configure switch:
./configure –x-includes=/usr/openwin/include –x-libraries=/usr/openwin/lib
In addition, if you’re installing to the your home directory (not /usr/local/bin, which you must if you’re not the administrator), you would need to add the prefix switch like below:
./configure –x-includes=/usr/openwin/include –x-libraries=/usr/openwin/lib –prefix=$HOME

All went well with the compilation to synergyc (client binary) and synergys (server binary) for me with the above customization. I set up the Sunray session as the Synergy client and the Windows PC as the server. On Sunray, I ran the following script (saved as synergy.csh) at each session:

#!/usr/bin/csh -f
# This program allows the keyboard and mouse to be shared/hosted with the PC
# that runs the synergy server. Run as
# > synergyc.csh
#
$HOME/bin/synergyc –display `echo $DISPLAY` –restart –daemon –name sunray $1

On the PC side you’ll need to set up the server to recognize the client. Setting up the server is not trivial but this link may help or do a google search on “synergy monitor sharing”.

For the last few weeks, I was annoyed by the fact that some of my directories on my Windows XP Pro machines cannot be deleted and they have been taking up lots of storage space. I kept getting the message: “Cannot delete xxxx: Access is denied. Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and the the file is not currently in use.” I didn’t know how it got to this state; it was really frustrating. My google search gave me a few tips including changing the file/directory permission and ownership. They didn’t work until I ran into the Unlocker software. This program really did the trick for me. I still don’t know how Windows XP managed to put these file folders in this “locked” state.

Encountered a strange problem on Vista when I plug in a newly-purchased USB flash thumb drive into the USB port. It was working OK until some time later, it started to complain about the not being able to load the driver.

Google search found the following issue and did the trick:
Apparently there is some bug with Vista where you can get a corrupt driver cache file and if you delete it then it will solve all these problems.
The culprit file is called INFCACHE.1 and it’s located in c:\windows\inf. I discovered this on a newsgroup post. This is the relevant parts:

When modify these system files, i usually find i have to take ownership first for my own user account, then add myself to the permissions with full control. then you can delete it, or rename it to X_INFCACHE.1, etc.”

Struggled with Sony’s ebook library software for a while. The menu items were not showing and the horizontal scroll bar didn’t work. Plus there was connection issue upon starting up. Installation and uninstalling did not seem work, until I found the following link through google search: This works well.
http://www.mobileread.mobi/forums/showthread.php?t=40987 (excerpt below)

This is another case of poor software programming that doesn’t remove all the files correctly upon un-installation. Sony should spend more time QA’ing this piece of software.

To help correct your issue with the eBooks software please follow the
below steps:

After doing so, reinstall your Connect Reader software from:
http://ebooks.connect.com/downloadclient.html

More trouble with the Vonage device. The audio quality has become unacceptable. Obviously, my previous setting of putting the Vonage router behind the Airlink Router and setting it to QoS didn't work well.

After talking with Vonage technical support for nearly 1 1/2 hrs, I was asked to put the Vonage in the DMZ of the router, which means it would have to defend for itself without the firewall. As it turns out, the QoS feature sacrifice too much of the bandwidth; it was getting only 2.5Mb/s download and 0.25Mb/s upload. This was the reason for the poor audio quality. By placing the Vonage router in the DMZ, it's getting roughly 15Mb/s download and 5Mb/s upload. Evidently, the computers are getting good speed as well.

The trick is to set the Vonage in static IP address; we use 192.168.1.130. You can do this by placing a computer behind the Vonage router in DHCP mode and log into 192.168.15.1 with User name of "router" and password of "router". And then go into the "Basic Setup" and select "Static IP Address" in the "Connect Using" drop down. Enter 192.168.1.130 in the IP address, Subnet Mask of 255.255.255.0 and default gateway and primary DNS of 192.168.1.1. For the Secondary DNS, I was told to use 4.2.2.2, probably just a dummy IP address. And then click Apply. The router needs to be rebooted followed by the rebooting of the Vonage device. Also, you may need to reboot the computers or disable/enable the network that were originally connected to the router. This wasn't a smooth and easy setup. But I finally got it to work. Not a task for the faint of heart. How do other laymen handle this kind of the problem? It's just amazing.

By the way, the following websites are great for checking speed: speedtest.net and mycooltools.com and click on myspeed.