Saturday, January 19, 2013

Going Wireless (NANO USB Card) and #39 The Other Minds Problem

Speeding up Desktop on BT Infinity


at the end of last year I was moaning about my poor broadband speeds and high cost now with BT Infinity I'm pretty happy, I have noticed though that speeds vary depending on the device in use. I've been getting over 20 Mbps on Tablet and Debbie's laptop PC (wirelessly) but been hovering around 11 Mbps on Desktop PC and at TV (still far faster than it was). I'm also not sure which is the best 'speedtester' . (I like this as it's connected to Channel 5's Gadget Show)
Nano- USB Dongle 
Well I thought that that the problem with lower speeds was probably the Powerline adapters and although they reckon on the box/description that they're 85 Mbps  I wasn't finding this. So I've spent £7.99 on a Wireless Adapter (ordered on Thursday arrived this morning) from e-bay seller Power Bay Inc
Dongle (which is tiny) came with CD ROM and is delivering at this moment 29 Mbps download and 7.84 Mbps upload according to BT Speedchecker.
The dongle uses IEEE802.11n Standard so had to make the change on the BT  Home Hub to  Channel 13 hopefully the Laptop won't mind (the Tablet doesn't).
So for me I'd recommend WiFi as opposed to this fence sitting article
Technology continues to deliver better solutions at lower prices- the complexity and reliability is amazing and makes me wonder what we'll have within the next 10 years.
Also I've now found with higher speed I'm already exceeding my download allowance  so will go to 'unlimited' option (this cost a little extra) and I believe the upper speed for this is 79 Mbps .

Number 39  The Other Minds Problem

 This is an interesting one - how can I tell that anybody else has a mind? It can be linked to Zombie-dom.
My understanding of this is how do I know that there are other sentient beings out there? All we can see is the external behaviour of others and this means that we don't know of other peoples minds ( if they don't have  minds they could be zombies).