Month: May 2009

A Good Router Is Hard To Find

It’s a good thing I gave my mother my old router, because the new one hasn’t been working out as well as hoped. It works fine for a while, but then eventually it suddenly loses all of its settings, reverting to defaults and making me restore them from a backup. If it ever happens while I’m away, it’ll leave my wireless network completely open until I can get back and fix it.

It’s hard to tell whether it’s a problem with DD-WRT or with the router hardware, though. I’m leaning towards the latter, as apparently one possible cause of symptoms like this is if the flash memory goes bad, but it’s still hard to prove what the problem really is. And it’s not like Linksys will support a third-party firmware under their warranty, and I really don’t want to shell out another $130 just to test on another router that might well have the same problem.

For now I think I’ll revert back to the official firmware and see if it has trouble as well. Tomato was extremely reliable on my old router, but it doesn’t support this model.

My God, It’s Full Of Pixels

Dell had its regular end-of-quarter sale recently, and I couldn’t resist picking up their 2408WFP monitor. It’s normally fairly expensive, but at around 40% off with the sale, it was a better deal than a lot of plain old mid-level monitors. It also fulfills a few needs of mine, as not only is it bigger (24″ versus 20″), but it has HDCP support and an HDMI input, and also two DVI inputs and a set of component inputs. Too many of my consoles were languishing on sub-optimal inputs already.

I just got it and set it up today, and so far it’s just as good as I’d hoped. It’s about as big as I’d want for the distance I sit away from it since it already pretty much fills my view, the PS3 looks amazing on the HDMI input, I can put both PCs on separate DVI inputs, the 360 can get the VGA input to itself and not go through the KVM, and the Wii can finally use component instead of crummy old S-video.

The only caveat so far is that for the Wii, I have to set the monitor’s scaling mode to ‘Fill’ in order to get a proper widescreen display. But I don’t want it set to that for the PS3, or it scales the 1920×1080 mode up to 1920×1200, stretching things vertically a bit, so the PS3 has to be set to 1:1 or ‘Aspect’ mode. Making sure it’s on the right mode is a minor annoyance, but I can leave it on Aspect 99% of the time since I haven’t been using the Wii much lately anyway.

Edit: Hmmm, I can see some backlight bleed in the corners on the right-hand side when the screen is dark. I don’t think I’ll do anything about it, though; I’ve heard of people returning their screens six or seven times in a row before they got one that didn’t bleed at all, and it’s only really noticeable when the screen is completely dark, so it’s not really that big a deal.