Hard(ware) times

Wouldn’t you know that just about the same time I got my new system, the laptop that my wife had been using gave up the ghost.  It was an old Dell Inspiron 2600 that died a merciful death, having long suffered from a progressive case of Wirth’s syndrome.

So I decided to move my old development system (a Dell Dimension with P4 and 1.25GB RAM) over to that end of the house for my wife to use.  We don’t have any ethernet cable over there, and I’m not about to climb under the house to run more than 100 feet of the stuff (yet).  The laptop operated fine on 802.11g using a card that was matched to the Linksys WRT54GX access point.  This system didn’t have wireless, and I couldn’t find a matching PCI card online, so I ordered a new Linksys 802.11g card.  But connectivity sucked.  My wife uses a lot of files on a shared folder on the server, and the share kept going down from mometary loss of connection.

So I ordered a new 802.11n access point and matching PCI card.  Linksys WRT330N churning out the aerial bits at 270 Mbps!  But connectivity got worse.

I tried out several channels on the access point, and I finally seem to have found one that doesn’t get too much interference (wide radio band, channel 9).  We’ll see how that holds up.

Next, my wife didn’t like the huge CRT monitor on her desk.  It takes up so much room compared to the laptop to which she was accustomed.  So I ordered her a new HP L1706 flat-panel LCD.  Much smaller footprint, and a much crisper display to boot.  For once, her sysadmin managed to do something that merited no criticism.

Having an extra monitor on my hands, I could now become a member of the dual monitor club by plugging it into the external monitor port on my laptop and configuring Vista to extend the desktop.  I’ve always had multiple computers, each with their own monitor, but I’m amazed at the productivity gain of extending one desktop with two monitors.  Just being able to fully read an email or feed while composing a post or modifying code has reduced my mousework dramastically.

Trouble is, the display on the old Sony Trinitron is considerably inferior to the WXGA+ Ultra BrightView on my laptop, even if it does have a larger viewable area.  Moving my eyes from the latter to the former is almost painful.  I guess now I’ll have to order another new monitor…