Cyntech’s Tech Blog

I have a problem. Well, if I wasn’t a gamer, I wouldn’t have a problem – although I might in a few weeks – but I am so I have a big problem.

Since the beginning of September, the world has changed around us, specifically trees. Decidious ones, to be precise. My wireless antenna had perfect line of sight – I thought – to the Access point (AP) that I connect to. However, it seems as though my line of sight actually went through a tree in front of my house. Now that it’s Spring, it’s starting to grow leaves and this week I’ve noticed a substantial drop in my internet access’s performance.

Symptoms include;

• Slow connection speed (the time it takes to actually connect to the network)
• Slow to non-existant pings to servers (via cmd prompt)
• Unplayable pings in World of Warcraft (I did say I was a gamer)

So, it is probably obvious that I’m going to have to move my antenna to get a better line of sight to the AP. The problem here is that it’s currently mounted on the Television Aerial mount and there’s no other mounting point available on the roof. I will have to construct one.

Another problem is that I had trouble finding the exact point of the AP.  I have a location on a map, but I took a drive today to a) verify the position and b) to see if I could see my house from there, but I couldn’t find it at the location specified.

One thing that I do not understand, however, is that pings in other games, like Team Fortress 2 are fine. So I’m not sure what’s going on there.

I have an old Epson TM-U210 receipt printer that I can’t seem to get to print anything.  I’ve double checked drivers and the ports they’re installed on and nothing gets through.  It’s a parallel model and the PC I’m using doesn’t have a parallel port, so I bought a PCI parallel adapter.  The PC has ‘detected’ the printer (using XP, changing the port to the port it’s configured on raises the ‘Found New Hardware’ message), but the spool window displays ‘Not available’ after the printer name in the title bar.

I posted this on OCAU as well (this link, if you are a member).  Hopefully I can get an answer to it.