WiFi Woes.

I have a small network at home running a Windows XP laptop, a Windows desk top and a Mac Mini. I recently move the Mac over to the TV so I could connect it up and watch TV programs I saved using a digital TV gizmo I purchased for my Mac, it's great because it has pretty much made the video machine redundant and recording is a breeze.

However this meant that the Mac was too far away from the ADSL gateway to be connected via a cable. Given that it was a first generation Mac Mini it didn't come with a wireless card installed. I decided that given that an Airport card would have cost almost twice as much as a windows wireless card and that the Mac Mini at least seems difficult to upgrade yourself, I choose to move the gateway closer to the Mac and get a wireless card for the PC.

This seemed great for a while, but I have been having plenty of problems with the wireless connection going down which needs a reboot to fix, this as you can imagine is a real pain especially given that my CVS server and MySQL database are on the Mac. This seems to only be a problem with the desk top as the laptop doesn't seem to have the same issues.

I was hoping to write a fair amount of content for www.mysqldevelopment.com today as I have been a little lax at updating it of late. But the connection has dropped a total of 3 times already. So as I sit here typing this I have the gateway back over near the Windows desktop connected via a cable. This means I'm not able to connect to the Mac but does allow me to vent spleen.

It's tempting to think that the more complex things become the more problems we have, but then I think back to when I had a spectrum as a kid and you would have to sit through 8 minutes of yellow and blue lines and binary sounds coming out of the tape recorder only to find that at the end it didn't recognise a section of that 48K of code and failed to load that game of Daley Thompsons Decathlon, or the cat decided sitting on the break button was a good idea when you left the thing on all night because you didn't have the energy to finish Jet Set Willy the night before.