Ever since moving to a larger home two years ago, I’ve been dealing with WiFi dead zones. The home is 2800 sf and it is a two-story home. The footprint is not very large though. You would have thought that a centrally located router/access point (router) would do the job. Not so. From day one I’ve had problems. The cable company router is located upstairs and in an office, while not central, very close to.
The first solution was to purchase one of those high-powered octopus antenna router units. This helped the adjacent rooms, but didn’t reach downstairs to the FireTV Stick in the back of the family room TV.
Second solution was to use a RAIR (redundant array of inexpensive routers) wired together with Ethernet over power lines with TP-LINK units. The remote routers were put in access point mode by turning off DHCP and assigning a static IP address to each unit. This was successful from a technical standpoint. There were four routers all connected to the cable modem router and it worked…sometimes. The TP-LINK units had to be power cycled about once a week.
The final solution turned out to be one of the latest mesh WiFi network setups. I purchased Google WiFi on the recommendation of tech guru Ty Smith. I unplugged all the RAIRs and configured Google WiFi following the instructions. It just worked. The mesh WiFi units were put in basically the same locations as the remote routers, but now everything works. No static IPs and no TP-LINKs.
Well, that’s almost true. My twins’ bedroom still has cruddy WiFi. So bad that they could not do homework on their Google Classroom account and turn in homework. The configuration below is what fixed it all.
Good thing I didn’t throw away the TP-LINK units. Turns out that the walls of the offending bedroom just has too much interference. I could have purchased another Google WiFi unit to see if that would help, but I had a bunch of TP-LINKS now sitting around gathering dust. The above configuration did the trick. In addition to providing WiFi to the previous uber-dead zone, I could now control the devices connecting through the remote router with the Google WiFi app on my Android phone.
Around September 2013 I decided to ditch AT&T for my mobile phone service and move to 
/ 
– Everyone wants a tablet, even if they don’t need one. They are one of the hottest tech gifts period. The reason for calling out both, rather than just the Nexus 7 is whether or not you are into Amazon Instant Video streaming. If you’re a fan of that service then the tablet to get is the Fire, otherwise I would get the Nexus 7. It is a quick tablet with a fabulous display. I would also skip the 10″ version of any tablet. They’re just too darn big.
– If you are receiving a constant stream of purchase from Amazon, there’s a good chance that you are already an Amazon Prime member, but how about your father-in-law. The impossible to buy for father-in-law. He could use Prime as well. Not only do you get free 2-day shipping on a significant percentage of items in the Amazon store, but you also get to stream all the available Instant Video choices that are included as part of the subscription.
I’ve been getting quite a bit of text message spam lately. Strange messages show up on my cell phone telling me how to get my horoscope or how to make $100/day by being an undercover shopper. How do you stop it?
If you’re a small business and are using the email service that comes with your Internet connection, you’re doing it wrong. Heaven forbid you’re using AOL or Yahoo as your email provider. At a bare minimum you should have a personalized email address with your company’s domain name. For example, I have the domain name russturley.com. When I give out my email address, it has my username, russ, along with my domain name. It’s much easier to remember than some obscure username at some local ISP’s domain name.
If you’ve ever thought to yourself, Why is my browser so slow?, then this post may shed some light on that. More often than not, when I come across a slow website, the problem ends up being Adobe Flash content. The site is either using Flash to deliver all or a portion of their content. It could be a video, advertisement, drop down lists, really any type of control on the page may be a Flash control. The by-product of that bit of Flash is a really slow website.
