The Lonesome Road

I’ve been having trouble with the integrated wireless card on my laptop since the day I started using it. The problem basically came in the fact that every once in a while it would simply forget that it was supposed to be connected to a network and drift into la-la land.

The thing is - I spent a month wondering whether the problem was from the router side or the card side. So, as any Computer Science person knows, the only way to test out is to change the hardware. The first change involved the router. We shitched from a D-Link to a Netgear router. Though the performance did improve, it was nowhere close to the net speeds that I have seen possible in this country.

Obviously, the only remaining option was to plug in a new external wireless card. The only problem was that I really didn’t want to buy one just for testing purposes. Luckily Fate smiled on me. One of my housies (like roomie - but we all share a house) got a new laptop and lent me her external wireless card to play with. I plugged it in last night - and the speed difference has been nothing short of amazing!

Unfortunately, everything comes with a price. The sound card and PCMCIA slot on my laptop (Sony VGNFS630W) are located very close together. Thus, whenever I surf, it is to the accompaniment of static hissing through my speakers. Highly annoying. When I ran a quick Google search on it, I got this gem of a page from Microsoft and a nice discussion on Google Groups. It seems that if there is not enough shielding, the sound card will produce static every time the card sends/receives data. And there is nothing that can be done about it. As simple as that.

So, I called Sony (LiveChat) and had a nice chat with customer support. They gave me two generic problem solution pages - New Card Installation and Sound Card Setting. Both useless. Ok, to cut to the chase. The problem was solved using the usual method that fixes almost all Windows problems. Reinstall driver and restart. Could have kicked myself for not doing that first.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well. Have high speed and good sound

Later!