Shopping Spree 2

The Shopping Spree continues…

Last Friday, I showed at CompUSA around 9am to grab a few things I had seen listed in a one day blast sale flyer.

I picked up a D-LINK DI-524 Wireless Router and a Kensington PilotMouse Mini Bluetooth.

The Kensington PilotMouse Mini Bluetooth is just great. Small and light. Setup was a breeze. I really like the pairing button located underneath. Click it and you're paired. Simple, just works.

It's really too bad the Kensington MouseWorks software/drivers are not Bluetooth-device aware. It would be nice to have a separate set of settings for the mouse and the trackpad.

The D-LINK DI-524 Wireless Router was another story. I decided to get a new wireless router with 802.11g since we're now both using WiFi a lot more. Setup was easy. Set the static IP, restart, etc.

I immediately noticed a problem with DNS. On the first try host names would simply not resolve. Everything worked fined on subsequent tries. I called Matt to see if he had any suggestions. We tried various things to no avail.

We were able to determine that the router was sending 192.168.0.1 (the router's internal IP) as the DNS server to all DHCP clients, instead of sending the DNS hosts that I had statically specified.

We decided to call D-Link's tech support to see if there was a way to fix that problem. After going through many loops, we were basically told that we would have to manually set the DNS hosts for each DHCP clients. Simply not acceptable.

Our tech support experience was pathetic. They were at a complete loss. Forcing us to repeat the same things over and over, and asking us to perform stupid tests, like pinging a host.

I did thank the support tech for making my decision to return their router easier.

Matt pretty much convinced me to look for a Linksys WRT54G instead.

I drove back to CompUSA to return the D-LINK. Their pricing on the Linksys was out of this world. On my way out I stopped by Office Depot, which is conveniently located in the same shopping mall. I figured it wouldn't hurt to check what they had to offer. They had a good price (after rebates) for the Linksys so I picked one up.

It literally took me 10 minutes to set it up at home, most of it spent taking it out of the box. It's been working like a champ since then.

As Matt mentioned, it is Linux-based, meaning that there are quite few firmware alternatives out there.

On Saturday, I decided to swap the heatsink/fan in my desktop computer. I was waiting to go back to Fry's to pickup some Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound, but actually found some at CompUSA on Friday.

Since I had never attempted the procedure before, I, once again, gave Matt a call so he could walk me through it. It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would. Taking the old heatsink out was the toughest part. Silicon was used to lock the clips in place which made it quite hard to remove.

Everything is working like a charm now. There's one big problem though, it sounds like a turbine now. The new power supply I installed is very quiet, but the opening/grid for its fan is located right next to the heatsink fan. The heatsink fan is quite noisy and the noise is amplified through the power supply grid openings.

At this point, I'm unwilling to spend any more on upgrades. This machine was put together a few years back and has finally reach its full potential. Adding anything more would be foolish.

So I started looking for a new desktop machine…

I just bought a Shuttle G4 8500G. They are offering a good closeout deal right now.

I have no experience with Shuttle's XPCs, but I'm pretty familiar with their motherboards. We use them in most of our 1U servers.

I wanted something small, because I am so tired of the mess of CPUs that is currently sitting on and under my desk. Having something portable is really not a bad idea, especially if I decide to take it with us when we move to Spain.

I should be receiving it sometime next week.

I'll also need to get some more memory and some kind of USB hard drive enclosure for my secondary internal drive. I'm leaning toward the Vantec NexStar model 2 or 3.

On Sunday night, I installed Vik's new Maxtor OneTouch II which I really like too. The only drawback, apart from the weight (it's not too heavy, but not extremely light either), is that the OneTouch functionality is only available via Firewire.

This has been an interesting weekend, that's for sure.