Sept 28:
Was asked today about loading DD-WRT or Tomato on the new router. Turns out Cisco decided to turn up their middle fingers towards those projects. They screwed with the NVRAM in a way that the third party Devs cannot work around.
Follow on entry:
While organizing my wrenches and sockets last night (another story for another day), I fired up the netbook to see how much of an increase I am getting on the 802.11g now that I moved the AP closer to the garage side of the house. One bar increase with a throughput of about 24Mbps. Not awesome, but it is an increase.
But, and this is where the story gets, yawn, interesting, I noticed that the card calls itself 802.11n. Well, hello there! I started monkeying around in the settings and could find nothing indicating anything about 5GHz or channel bonding, so I downloaded the latest drivers from Ralink (the manufacturer). After a reboot, I got a little excited when I saw the option to change the frequency, but it only listed 2.4GHz. 🙁
Being me, I started poking around the Innerwebs about this issue. Turns out it is a fairly common complaint. It is a really early draft N card and has no 5GHz anything in it, which means you are basically stuck at 802.11g speeds (54Mbps, theoretical max). I then started looking for better cards to use. I think I have a card in mind (and was very please with the ~$20 price tag), but have since learned that there are ways to add an addition antenna to the netbook to get MIMO (multiple in multiple out) working with true 802.11n cards. I am now mining eeePC user forums for info on how this is done. Lots of people say they’ve done it, but I am not finding the almighty HOWTO. Back to it.
Additional entry:
