Wifi Troubles

Yesterday whilst preparing Christmas lunch there was the oven, the water heater and the final straw, the microwave. Net result - the power cut itself off twice.

A side effect of these user provoked power cuts was that my wifi router stopped doing its thing.

This meant I had to dig out the manual and work out how to set the thing up again. Well, my D-Link DIR 635 is a clever, full functioned, but complex, wee beasty and it took me quite a bit of fiddling and resets to get the darned thing to provide me with secure wireless goodness once more. Still, at least all seems to be humming along well enough now, and even the new Wii is hooked up and working without a stutter.

Now, Wifi is wonderful, this I cannot deny, but setting routers and access points up can be a right pain in the butt, especially as its something most of us do about once every blue moon or when trouble strikes. I'm not too hot on just what I need to do, so I cannot remember just what needs to be done to get everything firing once more. At least this router, unlike the old D-Link, will allow me to get to its innards wirelessly without having to set up a temporary fixed IP address, and of course I can never remember what this fixed IP should be.

This time though, I saved the settings to a file generated by my router, so things should be more painless in the future. I also set the DHCP thingy to never expire on the PC I use to administrate the router. This should cure the mysterious signal drop which occurred every evening as a result of the DHCP renewing or something like that.

I just wish someone would get round to making these router things a wee bit simpler to set up. I'm no network expert, so I for one would benefit from a sort of intermediate level wizard system that would help me set these things up as they ought to be. The basic wizard is just that - basic.

Wishful thinking, I know.