New gadgets

A little bit of shopping this afternoon. I needed a USB wireless adaptor for Ferdinand, the Win XP Shuttle machine. I had originally bought Shuttle's own internal wireless card - but that never worked - so for a while I used the Linux shuttle (Gonzalo is you must know) as a router to the main network via a cross-over cable.

This worked OK but meant I couldn't use Remote Desktop or Samba to Ferdinand which was irritating. Then the ethernet port on Gonzalo failed so I had no choice but to get Ferdinand its own connection. A trip to PC world and I picked up a DLink 802.11G USB stick for 30 quid. It also came with a handy little extender cable and stand - in effect acting as its own aerial. This will hopefully stop it suffering from Gonzalo's problem where the wireless link quality just drops to 0 for no apparent reason.

Gonzalo's other problem is that ever since I upgraded the hard disc it's been crashing every week or two - usually with an I/O error if any reason is given at all. I ended up with a 160Mb drive with an 8Mb buffer because due to some strange offer they had on only the 80Mb drives were actually cheaper. Again I pondered SATA but decided against since they are still more expensive and I'm not confident about Linux's abiilty to handle them right now.