Living with wires... upgraded my drives and lost my wireless (for a while)...

By Aaron Tersteeg (Intel) (120 posts) on February 8, 2007 at 11:18 pm

You really don't know how good being mobile is until it's gone.

I recently installed updater software on both my PC and Mac that both resulted in me loosing wireless connectivity to my Dlink DI-624 base station. I've had the base station for a few years and thought that maybe it did not support the new updated technology.

As a result of losing wireless, I found myself hording and managing information in a disconnected state. Most of the technical people I know tend to keep a lot of there "bit in the cloud". And the more bits you have the more you need alternative storage strategies. Media is a typical example. Before I lost my wireless I streamed most of my music and video. For example if I wanted to watch the NBC Nightly News I'd just go to the web site and watch the stream. But since I lost my wireless connection I needed to figure out a way to get the information to be stored locally. I found that pod casts are a great way to do this and the amount of video pod casts are just exploding. The same NBC program is available for free download to watch off line. I subscribed to the content and a band-aid has been applied.

But the root cause of my problem still lingered. Did I need to get ride of my Dlink and buy a new wireless access point? If my wife's laptop internet connection had died at the same time as my two other laptops did then I'd have a new access point AND it would have new WLAN online storage (for more media bits). But her connection continued to work fine. So it looked like I had to spend time rather than money to solve this problem.

In the old consumer electronics world when things get old you upgrade the hardware. I can't image that 10+ years ago if someone wanted a new feature of the ability to connect an amplifier to a DVD player they would contact the amplifier company and get the system update to accept DVD connections. But in today's world you can pretty much count on at least a couple software upgrades to improve the compatibility and functionality of your gear. So I went hunting on the Dlink web site. And like I thought"? there are firmware updates for the wireless access point that I have. I download, updated and was back in action. (lesson learned, if you can't get a DHCP IP address, clone your MAC address, woked like a charm.)

This got me thinking... I'm a technology guy. Part of my job is knowing about the software and hardware. How do users that don't know about firmware have even half a chance solving these types of issues? What is the solution?

Categories: Mobility

Comments (1)

July 14, 2008 10:21 AM PDT

Aaron Tersteeg (Intel)
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 It is great to see that so many people found this blog post and are intersted in Intel's drivers. I would suggest that you go to http://downloadcenter.intel.com/ to search throught the complete list of drivers and versions for your specific hardware.

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