A Better Title

I don’t know what’s wrong with me and the Internet lately.

Since last semester when the school completely upgraded their wireless system, I have been having tremendous problems trying to connect using my laptop. Sometimes it will be connected just fine for a couple of hours. Other times the connection will get rapidly disconnected and connected.

Everytime it happens, it screws up all my existing connection, causing me to get disconnected from MSN and leaving web pages to get loaded only halfway through. The rapid disconnection usually happens every 10 seconds or so for a few minutes, before it gets disconnected totally (or, in rare occasions, back to connected).

Other times the laptop doesn’t get connected at all although it looks like it does. The only way to get properly reconnected is to unplug and replug my wireless card. More often than not, the connection only lasts for one web page. No, that’s not a typo either, it really lasts only for me to load one web page on Firefox, before the connection dies again. Then I have to unplug and replug the wireless card again.

There are times when my laptop decides to puke the moment I unplug the wireless card (something to do with Windows expecting the card to be there when it’s not there, I believe). The laptop will just get restarted automatically. This is a terrible nightmare, especially if I have just opened many tabs in Firefox before the laptop crashes.

Sure, there’s such thing as the “Restore Session” feature in Firefox, but the problem is that the moment the laptop gets restarted, the authentication to the wireless system sometimes gets expired. Which means that I’ll have to log on to the wireless again. You see, the thing is that the wireless authentication is done via a web interface whenever the laptop attempts to connect to a website. Trust me, restoring the session in Firefox is NOT a good idea in this case. If I had 20 tabs open when the laptop crashes, I will see 20 authentication windows to complete. Not a pretty sight at all.

Fair enough, I’m suspecting it has something to do with my wireless card, which is why I’m getting a new wireless card tomorrow. Or if anyone can be so kind to advice me on which bank or person I can rob for $1700 to get the cheapest laptop in school, I’ll be more than grateful.

As if the bad wireless connection in school is not enough, the connection at home is just as bad. The Starhub connection is somehow extremely slow. I’m not exaggerating when I said that sometimes my M1 3G connection is faster than the Starhub connection, especially for overseas websites.

The Starhub connection is particularly bad when it comes to viewing videos on Youtube. Take the case right now, I’m trying to watch this 6-minute video. It took me 5 minutes to buffer the first 2 minutes of the video. The remainder of the video is never loaded at all, i.e. when you play the video it will get cut off at the 2-minute mark. The only way to continue is to refresh the page, which causes the whole video to get loaded right from the beginning again. Then 5 minutes later, the video will get cut off again, perhaps this time at the 30-second mark.

Seriously, this is getting very irritating. It doesn’t help that I need to do my work in school (too much distractions at home, I know part of the problem lies on my self-discipline). I just hope that things will get better in the times to come.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.