one note when using it is that I’d manually set it to one of the 5ghz channels higher on the spectrum (~130s) because it defaults to a lower transmit power for the lower channels due to it being relatively early Wifi 5.2 hardware and that spec being unfinalized at the time – it’s a small thing and it’ll boost your effective range by like 30% with no downsides
I have a TP Link A20 and before that I had a TP Link C7. Both are good.
I’ve had mixed experiences with newer midrange TP Link routers as far as wake on WLAN, wifi-to-wifi stream latency, and some wireless devices not always reconnecting quickly – I actually do like that particular model, and it’s quite cheap now
Is it a wifi router location issue? My issue was living in a 150 year old brick apartment building with the cable access in one corner and everything else 3-4 walls away, some of which were brick and some were tile. No mesh system helped mainly because the main router was sequestered in a brick box. Those $30 buffalo wifi extenders that I plugged into a wall were literally useless.
After spending literal years trying to find a technological solution I wound up doing the 2 access points and an edgerouter X (total cost, $200, total time investment to learn probably around 10 hours).
It was definitely the best option but still wasn’t great so I ended up buying 30ft of Cat6 cable ($10 from microcenter) and a staple gun made specifically for running cat cable ($8 from home depot) and running cable along the kickplates on the wall to a more central location (total time investment probably 8 minutes). Solved every issue I had and I could still use the old asus router I had bought back in like 2013.
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gonna agree on “don’t get an extender, get a new router” because they’re comparable in price and newer routers will blast wifi directly into your eyeballs from every direction, comparatively anyway
I’m using this one: TP-Link AC1750 Dual Band Wireless Gigabit WiFi 5 Router- (Archer C7) : Target
But I suspect any modern router, especially ones with those movable antennae, is gonna be better than what you got going on. I upgraded a 5 year old router and the difference was night and day.
i hadn’t considered this though, my house is made of plaster and wood and a little bit of hope
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is there a device or tool i can use to allow the corrupting powers of 5G beams to more comprehensively permeate my flesh
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build a faraday cage around a cell tower and then get in with it
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there’s a millimeter wave tower not far from me where i can get hilarious speeds in a two block area, gonna fuck around and get radiation powers
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so have we talked about how the tariff exceptions ran out and the prices of GPUs have exploded in the last week, on top of the current wave of insane demand and low supply
the Microcenter by me had RX 580s for 270 dollars and they sold out
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That’s the one I have. My only complaint is it only does SMB 1 for the usb drive network shares, so those won’t Just Work automatically in Windows anymore without changing some scary sounding security settings or doing a work around and adding a second network share location entry for it.
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yeah, that’s also why I finally got a real NAS when I switched to home fibre last year and started hosting a bunch of stuff for friends, because it didn’t really feel secure enough to share globally at that point. but it’s a very performant, cheap, reliable router still (I can’t get reliable gigabit + wifi WOL + 2 USB3 connetions from most contemporary stuff the way I can from this, I’ve tried) – it’s one of those situations now where like, I honestly wouldn’t recommend something between this $50 used thing and what I hear is going to be a $500+ first-gen Wifi 6E router unless you need a very particular mesh setup, the retail-available mid-end is useless
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It seems like everyone I know has some wack ass router that needs to be regularly manually or automatically reset and that’s never been an issue with any of mine.
Even with the Windows 10/attached USB issue, I’ve really dug loading up a giant thumb drive with music and videos and having those accessible across my network. My TV and the iOS version of Foobar2000 both have no issue accessing it. I’d had been on the verge of using an old Raspberry Pi to set up a NAS so this saved me a spot on my power strip and on my network switch.
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Needed a rar extractor to install Murder Dog IV, and noticed that Windows 10 still couldn’t be assed to provide a rar extractor out of the box, so I faced the possibility of for the 10th time in my life, googling for a Windows rar extractor, figuring out which one isn’t trialware or something, and going through an install wizard just to get at the contents.
But instead I just popped into WSL and apt-get install unrar. Really liking this new world where I can casually run Linux tools in Windows and ChromeOS whenever that provides a friendlier experience than the native crap. Likewise, I was able to use gpg to password-encrypt a backup zip file last month after realizing that, despite its bad reputation, gpg was actually far easier to use for this purpose than every other encryption tool.
I realize choco and homebrew respectively in theory have been supposed to do the same thing for years now, but those ecosystems have always remained more than a slight hassle and never reached the convenience of apt-get (if only because choco and homebrew themselves don’t come preinstalled).
7z is fine though and you should basically have that from choco as part of a stock windows install
(I take the point, I quibble with the example)
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Well, the only problem with that is that you’re really talking about some kind of improved headcanon of “stock”, what you know to do minutes after installing Windows, rather than the literal meaning of “stock windows install”. And being a closed-source operating system there’s no way to distribute your obvious improvements to the new and ignorant unless Microsoft feels like it.
Fortunately, Microsoft has felt like adding such overdue things as a better terminal and notepad lately. Unfortunately I’m getting the feeling that their new apt-get-equivalent project might be dead-on-arrival. I have no desire to start using it, what’s in it for me when it has no apps? And the app developers might feel the same way about the lack of user demand. It will have the preinstalledness I crave but not the app ecosystem.
It’ll be a test for whether preinstalledness on its own is strong enough to draw away an ecosystem, or whether the network effects of choco and WSL-apt-get will choke the air out of it. It would have been a faster and more reliable solution for Microsoft to acquire choco or something…
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winget will be an actual stock windows install thing fairly soon right
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yeah, that they declined to acquire choco or scoop when they shipped this new native package manager is weird. frankly they have been having a lot of success with NIH-ing open source stacks lately – more than canonical ever dreamed – so I guess it remains to be seen how successful they’ll be, but there’s definitely stuff in choco that I wouldn’t want a commercial platform owner having to make qualitative judgments about.
though, on the other end of things, it looks like WSL will have much better filesystem and GPU integration pretty soon, and if that really comes along (and they can make the overhead from perpetually running their docker-esque kernel near-negligible; I’m still vaguely disappointed that they decided to deprecate WSL 1.0 which had an actual binary compatibility layer so quickly b/c they got tired of optimizing it), then it should be easier and easier to just use apt as the de facto package manager, rather than the half-and-half solution I’ve been working with since 2016
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Anybody care to recommend a Chromebook (or a manufacturer thereof) for my mom? She’s got a fairly old Windows laptop that probably needs to be put out to pasture, pretty sure it’s running Windows Vista. She’s been turned onto the Chromebook thing by seeing them in action because my nephews use them for school, and from my own experiences owning one for a while I think they’re pretty good if you don’t need a lot of computer.
Her use case is pretty strictly online shopping/bill paying/email, I doubt she’ll even ever use the thing for Netflix since she’s got an Apple TV in the livingroom and a Kindle Fire tablet so she’s pretty set on media consumption.
She doesn’t want to spend much more than about $250, and is vehemently opposed to buying anything refurbished. The only thing I tried to talk her into was splurging for a machine with 8gb of RAM but that’s only because my old Chromebook used to crash under the weight of too many browser tabs which I think is probably not a problem she’s going to run into so I guess 4gb is fine.
One more note: I actually just tried to talk my mom into upgrading her phone instead (because her phone is pretty old and busted and also her entire use case is basically handled by a phone nowadays, but she wants a proper keyboard and a large screen)