New Computer Toys

Yesterday I went shopping for various computer accessories, including a wireless router, Bluetooth mouse and memory. I first went to the store where I bought my PC last year, Datel, to find out if I could add another gigabyte of RAM to my computer and they said yes. So I bought the RAM to give my PC a total of 2 gigabytes of RAM. After all, I couldn't let my Apple computer have more memory than my PC.

Then it was off to Fry's Electronics to buy a Bluetooth Mouse for my Mac. I went to Fry's because I knew they would have a good selection of mice to choose from. In fact, they had too many mice. I spent almost 30 minutes try to decide which one to buy, and I finally decided on a Kensington mouse. I had never heard of this brand, but I liked the mouse because it was small, light weight and had all the features I was looking for, such as three buttons, scrolling wheel and an "off" switch to save battery life. It didn't take too much to get the mouse working, I just had to turn in on and then get the Mac to recognize the device. The mouse seems to work well, and it is a lot better than using the laptop's finger pad. I also like how the Mac automatically handled the right mouse button and scroll wheel. The standard Apple mouse has only one button, and I really like being able to use the right button to bring up menus with options such as "Copy" and "Select", just like on a PC running Windows. The one annoyance is that once the mouse is "asleep", it takes about 30 seconds before it turns on, but I can live with that.

My last purchase was a wireless router. I had researched routers online and found that for every model and brand, there were really good and bad reviews. It seems people either claimed that their router was terrible or it was the best, leaving the average score 5 out of 10. So at Fry's I looked at routers from Linksys, D-Link and Netgear. Then a salesman asked if I needed help, which they rarely do at the store. I told him my delima and he suggested the D-Link WBR-2310, which was on sale. It had the features I wanted, mainly security related, plus it was a "rangebooster G" router, which claims to double the speed of the normal 54Mbps (megabits per second). However, to use this feature, you need to have wireless card on your PC/laptop with the same capability, which I don't. Maybe in the future. So, I went ahead and bought it.

Setting up the router was relatively easy. It comes with a CD, and when you run the install program, it steps you though connecting the router, starting off with disconnecting your current router. Then, it installed a program called Network Magic. I didn't realize that this application was not necessary, so I installed it. It provides an easy interface to maintain your computer network and wireless router. However, it wants to take over control of your networking completely. I wanted to access a shared folder on my PC from my Mac, which I had done before, but Network Magic wanted me to convert the folder to a Network Magic folder, and then install Network Magic on all computers connected to my network. I really didn't want to do this, so I uninstall the program and suddenly my Mac could once again access the folder on the PC. Lesson learned.

After getting all three of my computers connected, including by wireless with my Mac, I made my router more secure by disabling the broadcast of my SSID (service set identifier). This keeps other (neighbor's) wireless devices from detecting and using my router. Then I set it up to only allow my computers to use the router by limiting access by MAC address (a unique, 12 digit code embedded in every network card). Then I enabled password protected WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), which requires a password to connect to my router. After I finished, I was still able to use the wireless connection with my Apple. Today, I took my Mac into the living room, located about 30 feet and one wall away, and the connection was good. I tested the speed using a web site called DSL Reports, to test my connection speed to the Internet. Now this number can vary depending on the time of day, but my download speed was 4332 Kbps (541 Kbytes/sec) and my upload speed was 357 Kbps (46 Kbytes/sec). That wasn't too bad.

Hope you found some of this information helpful, and I hope I can now finally enjoy the world of wireless computing.