So my old AMD has some fun history. I think I got it back in early '04 back when I used to prefer AMD over Intel (the AMD I got after that converted me to Intel, but that's a different story).
I had my computer in a wireless network situation, and found out that WEP (the old wireless security) takes like 4 seconds to crack, and wanted to upgrade to WAP, which is better but probably still takes less than 20 minutes. But I digress.
I had an old-technology WEP card that worked with it, but I wanted to upgrade my security. The rest of my wireless network was running on WAP so I popped in the other card I had. It made my computer freeze. I tried and took back at least 5 different WAP-capable network cards, none of which worked. I came to find out that my particular motherboard's PCI bus had a weird timing issue with the Atheros-based network interface cards, which is pretty much all of the network cards out there. I tried a few odd brands hoping they weren't atheros based, and I may have found one but it didn't work either.
I ended up running a wire.
Today I was given the options of letting my son play kid games on my own computer (which would consist of a. me not using the computer and b. the keyboard and mouse getting sticky. And I hate that.) or getting the old AMD to work.
Somehow I came up with the idea of trying a USB-based wireless adapter.
I bought the WUSB100 from Linksys for $40 and plugged it in. I burned the latest Ubuntu client (3 times- the first was a flat data CD with a .iso file on it, the 2nd tried to write too quickly and was corrupted, third times the charm at reliable 4x speed.) and installed it up. It's a really slick installer, by the way. I probably like it better than the old XP installer. I can't tell you how I like the vista/win7 installer because so far I've managed to avoid that train wreck.
Anyway, it all worked flawlessly minus the wireless turning off about 15 seconds after bringing up the google page and repeatedly asking me for my password. I found this fix (not really sure why it worked but it did) and then had to mess around with flash and quicktime plugins (oh, not to mention a pretty painless Nvidia driver install) and the machine is good to go in all its 2004 glory.
Of course, by WAP I mean WPA.
3 comments:
Yeah, I would've just switched to WEP. You're a more dedicated man than I am :-)
My '04 computer (laptop) has become a dedicated DVD player since (a) it has no built-in wireless and (b) all 3 USB ports gradually died as my USB wireless got cycled through each.
My previous computer's (between the '04 and current) USB ports lost the ability to do USB 2.0, and could only go slow-style. It took me a while to figure it out and set them to slow speed.
Hopefully I don't run into the issue you had with the NIC blowing usb ports. I don't expect the computer to last forever, though! It's weird how some computers die at 6 months and others refuse to die.
Agreed. My friend and I bought our computers at the same time (about '06?). So far only my CD drive has died, but on his we've had to replace the CD drive, hard drive, power supply, and video card. And something's still wrong with it.
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