Les Jones

Blogging > Happy 2004 (also Wireless, Laptops, and a Mac for Sale)

Happy New Year's to all of my readers. For the first time since I had chicken pox a decade ago I didn't go out for New Year's Eve. I've had a cold this week, so I was a little tuckered, and Melissa and I were laptop-shopping before the end of the 2003 tax year.

We bought a his-and-hers set of Compaq 2190s from BestBuy. If you're looking for an affordable laptop, these can't be beat. Very quick and only 650 Samollians. (The extended 3 year warranty is about $250 per. For that price we could nearly buy a spare. We'll take our chances, thanks.)

BTW, if you're at BestBuy and want to bypass the kiosk screen and actually use the laptop, type Control-M. The local store uses "bestbuy" as the password on some of their computers.

Power Mac for Sale
Yep, after publishing a book about Macs, I'm going WinTel. For what I do, Windows is just as good, the hardware is faster and cheaper, and there's more software.

If anyone in the Knoxville area wants a Power Mac G3 233 I'll make you a deal. 40 GB HD, 320 MB RAM, dual-port USB card, and I'll throw in a Kensington trackball, an 17" Apple monitor, and any other Mac-only goodies and cables I have in the computing labor-a-tory. Call it 200 bucks and I'll buy you a beer and regale you with stories. LATER: I just realized I won't need my Mac software anymore, so I'll throw in licenses for Microsoft Office, Filemaker Pro, Norton, and whatever else I've got.

Wi-Fi
I also used the time at home to set up a LinkSys wireless 54G router. It was fairly easy, though I've set up my share of modems, ISDN modems, cable modems, firewalls, etc., so I'm not the best judge. I came this close to buying a D-Link system because it was cheaper, but another customer at the store said he bought one and couldn't get more than 20 feet from the access point before the signal petered out. After hours of work with tech support he swapped it for the LinkSys and hadn't had any problems since.

Sure enough, our Linksys is working great with no tweaking. The G routers and cards are backwards-compatible with 802.11B, and offer higher speed and longer range in G mode. G is now a standard, so it's a safe time to buy. Be sure to change the default password/SSID (linksys). To keep people from roaming on your network, turn off SSID broadcasting. Even better: use the MAC address filtering so that only your computers/NICs can access the wireless network. Come Friday I'll pick the brains of the security engineers at work. Meanwhile, here are more Wi-Fi security tips.