welo

Down in the US as well? Down for everyone or just me?

What to users in the US see? thumbalizr - thumb your webpages

Thanks for the link. The codeguru article was an interesting read.

It seems that on 4GB systems the increased memory consumption of 64-bit programs might indeed outweigh the benefit of being able to use the entire 4GB (if the dedicated memory of your video card is not more than 0.5GB).

The performance penalty for running 32bit apps on a 64 bit system is rather minimal, and is comparable to the performance gain of some apps when available as 64bit editions. Most CPU hungry applications are most likely available in a 64bit edition by now anyway.

Therefore I consider speed penalties or gains not really relevant for a decision 32 vs. 64bit in most setups.

Having done a quick google research I wonder how relevant the alleged limited life-time of SSDs related to write operations really is...

Have a read here

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

what the article basically says is that 'write endurance is not a factor you should be worrying about', meaning that you don't need to worry about doing 'too much writing' to your solid-state drive. And the article writes about usage of SSDs in professional server environments!

From what I understand it all boils down to 'wear leveling' and how effect it is. I further understand that over the life time of a SSD, wear leveling can actually decrease performance if not using TRIM (source: Solid-state drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I am still confused though, is this article unbiased or just a marketing piece for promoting SSDs?

Some quotes from the article

The way that SSD oems deal with the management of write endurance internally within their products varies but they all have the common theme of scoring how many times a block of memory has been written to, and then reallocating physical blocks to logical blocks dynamically and transparently to spread the load across the whole disk. In a well designed flash SSD you would have to write to the whole disk the endurance number of cycles to be in danger.

How long have you got before the disk is trashed?

[...]

Write endurance rating: 2 million cycles. (The typical range today for flash SSDs is from 1 to 5 million. The technology trend has been for this to get better.)

[...]

2 million (write endurance*) x 64G (capacity) divided by 80M bytes/sec (ideal write speed assuming writing in large blocks) gives the endurance limited life in seconds.

That's a meaningless number - which needs to be divided by seconds in an hour, hours in a day etc etc to give...

The end result is 51 years!

*We assume perfect wear leveling which means we need to fill the disk 2 million times to get to the write endurance limit.

Limited free space on a partition will

• increase write times - larger files cannot be written in one go but will be split into fragments. This applies to any heavily fragmented file system, however
  
• a defragmentation process will take longer on partitions with only little empty space
  

15-30% of free space are the numbers that I have heard related to this question.

Maybe dave_boo is right that the IT engineer recommended 50% because of the performance of traditional disk drives declining from the 'start' to the 'end' (outer to inner tracks), often significantly, cutting average transfer rates in half.

However, this could easily be avoided by using partitioning strategies. You could even create a single partition that covers only half of the harddisk and not use the second half at all. But in typical home user setups you can always use the 'slower' half of the drive for less important data (data archive, mp3 collection etc), no need to waste it.

For SSD vs. 10000rpm drives google 'SSD vs raptor' and save a view hours for a good read

If money is not the issue then the SSD is the better performing solution I guess.

Anybody knows how defragmentation relates to SSD drives?

Two links that help to find who is to blame when a website is offline:

Down for everyone or just me? (checks if the website is down from a webserver in the US)

thumbalizr - thumb your webpages (creates a screenshot of the website accessing the site from a webserver in the US)

Do you plan to pull a cable to connect your access point with the (base) router, or do you plan to go wireless only.

AFAIK the latter would require what is generally called a 'repeater' resp. a access point in 'repeater' mode. This will pick up the traffic on a wireless network and re-broadcast the traffic on a different channel under the same SSID. A client should detect such a setup and automatically connect to the stronger signal.

AFAIK not all (AP, router) devices support this mode, even though it is not a matter of hardware but the firmware (software).

I tried this only two times in this life, one time with two D-link devices a view years back, and just last year with two belkin devices. Both times the devices I used as 'repeater' had specifically supported this mode.

The first setup was trying to bridge a distance that was too long for those devices and was therefore not stable (outdoors, weather dependent), the second time recently was an inhouse setup and it works pretty much stable.

Both times the setup was not really straight forward. However, the troubles on my recent setup was due to some non-standard issue with my network. I assume the setup should be easy in most cases.

However, I'm still a bit wary about repeaters and would prefer a cabled connection between router and access point for better stability.

If you go for a wireless repeater setup you will probably yield best results if both devices are of the same brand (even though this recommendation might not apply any more nowadays).

welo

Some thoughts...

Speedtest uses parallel connections, youtube doesn't.

Youtube download speeds shouldn't depend that much on the hardware unless your computer has a 'problem' or your computer is very old and takes longer to render the website.

You could try to download a Youtube movie (using a firefox extension or an online service). Then compare speeds. Don't use any download manager that uses parallel connections for this kind of speed test.

Did you change any DNS settings on your second computer?

welo

Roy,

I completely agree with your statement. Loosing 1GB or more of RAM doesn't justify any inconveniences you might have with 64bit Windows 7.

In the OPs situation I personally would have still gone with 64bit, but I'm not somebody who pushes another user into doing something he/she doesn't feel comfortable with - if not for a very good reason. And his setup is really 'border-line', meaning that he probably looses only about 300-400MB depending on how much more memory the OS uses in the 64bit edition compared to 32bit. Do you have any numbers/comparisons on this matter?

Laptops often still come with only little dedicated video memory. As soon as you get any half-decent video card for a desktop PC you will probably end up with 1GB of dedicated video memory or more, and 64bit Windows is a must if you have more than 2.5-3GB of RAM.

welo

First bug.......... have a el-cheapo Wifi router / model at work (nlink)...W7 can work with it, but another XP laptop has no issues

Not really proof that Windows 7 is to blame. Did your laptop work with this Access Point before when you had XP installed?

Did you run the Network and Internet Troubleshooter?

Click the symbol for the wireless connection in the taskbar, then 'Open Network and Sharing Centre'. In the windows that now opens click the entry at the very bottom, named 'troubleshoot problems'.

I don't think there is an incompatibility, it might be a rather mundane problem like IP setup being wrong.

Troubleshooting: Any wireless connection is a two tier connection. First the wireless link, and on top of that the TCP/IP link (->IP address such as 192.168.1.2).

Did the wireless connection work? Usually you will get a yellow triangle with exclamation mark on top of the tray icon if the wireless connection works but the IP assignement fails.

Windows 7 is better at telling you what actually went wrong. How does the wireless system tray icon show?

welo

This is the Linux sub-forum...

I'm afraid setting up internet sharing requires a bit of interaction from your side to get it working.

We need to figure out what is going wrong and need to have more information on your setup.

To answer siamect's questions you will need to run 'ipconfig /all' on both computers and copy the results here.

See here:

How to find IP address in windows xp

welo

@phazey, siamect

So you guys think that the router is actually routing 192.168.1.1 over to the WAN (since we now know that the LAN is actually set to the 192.168.0.x subnet)? Then somehow another router or transparent proxy or whatever shows the 'blocked by ICT' message?

Sounds possible to me.

However, I'd still consider the possibility that the OP's web browser search page has been hihacked.

@gonzo

May I ask you to do a view simple checks/answers - I'm curious what exactly caused the ICT message to be shown. This might increase our knowledge of Thailand's network setup and help explain some 'ISP mysteries', maybe allowing us to help another person in the future.

What web browser are you using? Internet Explorer?

Can you click these three 'links' resp. enter/copy them into your browser's address bar and explain what happens?

http://192.168.1.1

192.168.1.1

some question

Please do NOT add the http:// to the second and third link, and just enter the words in the third line separated by a space.

Thanks!

welo

Solution is courtesy of siamect who posted first, I just made the answer 'more accessible'

Maybe I should be happy that the OPs problem is solved. However, I still wonder whether the others might not have been so wrong after all.

I wonder whether your browsers search page or 404 error page has been hijacked. Try typing a search term in your address bar, to be sure two words separated by a comma, e.g. 'whats going on', and hit enter. Usually Google or Bing should show up with a search result page.

What happens on your computer?

Which browser (version) do you use?

welo

I further assume that there is no 'effect' tool that will easily produce the desired result with only a view clicks. If you haven't done any photo editing with (semi)-professional tools before, using layers, masks, free-form select, my guess is you will have a hard time achieving the desired result.

That said, it doesn't seem too hard. I just tried a simple approach with Paint .NET - a very simple photo editing tool - and came up with this in just 10 minutes. What goes into black and what into white is mostly an 'artistic' decision. Getting areas and borders 'smooth' is manual work with the paintbrush (or similar tools). I didn't do a good job at the latter as you can see.

Basically used the level tool to separate into black and white (after converting the image to grayscale).

Photoshop is available as a standalone product, no need to purchase the whole suite. It is still very pricey though - Photoshop is a pro tool and industry standard.

mrclough,

your post seems well reasoned. I didn't switch the SIM card yet so I don't know if this will fix the problem.

I am pretty sure that my problem (can't speak for the OP) only occurs with one SIM card. I used a second SIM card and of course second phone for troubleshooting, using all possible combinations and checking the outcome.

Troubleshooting is not easy as always if a problem doesn't have a 100% failure rate. You have to be careful to draw conclusions and repeat a test several times before assuming that it worked or did not work. There is always the chance that it was just randomness that made it work/not work after a specific change in the setup.

I actually found a setup where I could achieve a high failure rate that allowed me to troubleshoot more easily. Namely using a Thai based VOIP phone service that provides a callback service. You call a number in Bangkok, they will hang up after a view rings, and call you back (automatically by a machine) a view seconds later.

In my case, using one SIM card (in either phone) would lead to the callback not reaching my phone (no ring, no missed call) most of the times (it actually drove me nuts!). When the problem started the phone call would actually reach my voicebox and record the machine voice, therefore I disabled the voicebox later in the process.

Switching the SIM card to another phone would yield the same result. Another SIM card in both phones with the same service and test setup would work 100% of the times.

During all the time the signal would have maximum strength.

Test calls from my second phone or a friend's phone would not trigger the problem, or at least not during my tests.

Go figure that one out!!

I don't know enough about mobile phone networks to explain that behavior. I still can't be sure that my conclusions are 100% accurate. I didn't run that many test calls, and didn't vary the test scenario enough to rule out other components involved (e.g. run the test from a different location using a different antenna tower)

I am very interested in your analysis of my situation.

Make sure you read my original discussion topic as well.

welo

Right-click -> Open In New Tab

http://192.168.1.1

http://192.168.1.254

http://192.168.0.1

http://192.168.0.254

Good old trial and error

Otherwise here a pictured tutorial for siamect's suggestion to find out the exact address instead of trying to guess it...

How to find IP address in windows xp

You require the entry for 'default gateway'.

Or if the command line just scares you crazy, here a point and click way of finding out

Windows XP, without using the command prompt

1. From the Start menu, right-click My Network Places, and then click Properties.

2. To view the IP address of a wired connection, double-click Local Area Connection.

To view the IP address of a wireless adapter, double-click Wireless Network Connection.

3. Click the Support tab, and then click Details... . The window that appears will display the IP address.

source: How do I determine my computer's IP address? - Knowledge Base

Post a link to the website on thaivisa... NOT!

I recently had problems with my wife's phone that international calls would not 'get through' to my phone. Even though my phone being on and at full signal strength it would not ring when somebody called.

She is on 12call as well.

It appears to be tied to the SIM card. Others suggested that replacing it (while keeping the number) might solve the problem, might be due to a SIM card problem and hers is actually a view years old. Haven't had the chance to do that yet.

The problem seemed to be more frequent with international calls, however, it might just as well be that in those cases one is more attentive and aware of the failed call.

Check out my topic.

Many possible reasons for your troubles.

First step definitely is to check your ADSL line quality like Pib said.

You will have to access the modem's web interface, login usually is admin/tot.

try

http://192.168.1.1 or

http://192.168.0.1

Another idea: take your modem to your neighbour and see how the connection is there. If it works fine, then the (inhouse) cable to your apartment is the troublemaker (just as siamect suggested).

Be aware that the inhouse cabling is not TOTs responsibility. However, they should at least have had the line checked when they installed the modem or should stop by and do it now.

Otherwise I recommend contacting your local TOT office, not the 'global' hotline. And as always in Thailand: make your point and be persistent, but stay calm and friendly.

welo

I agree. Like I said in a previous post, did you really try everything to get the BIOS options right. Even if there is no dedicated 'boot from USB' option the Vaio might still support it.

This is from a discussion about one older Sony Vaio model.

Boot Configuration

External Device Boot: Enabled (must)

Boot Priority

External Device (top)

Otherwise I'm glad to find out that PLop is a project from one of my fellow countrymen! -> www.plop.at

I found this while doing some searching on the subject...

Load balancing is not the same as modem bonding (aka: shotgun). They are two very different things.

Thanks for the link, it just got me more confused

I thought multilink-PPP takes two distinct PPP connections and bonds them. PPP is a data-link OSI layer wise (layer 2) and AFAIK a logical protocol. But the article writes about signal multiplexing, so I'm a bit confused. Well, that OSI layer stuff was never my strong point

Thanks for pointing out the difference between bonding and load balancing. I was aware of the difference when I finished writing my post, not necessarily when I wrote the opening line

If considering the purchase of a dual-wan router it might actually be important to find out if the desired model does actually rely on MLPPP ('bonding') or provides 'load balancing' on TCP/IP level. I found one comment that the cheaper dual-wan routers actually expect MLPPP - not sure if Thai ISPs offer this at all, and I further think that requires two lines form the same ISP.

However, I later remembered that some of the custom router firmware projects provide solutions to turn a standard 'DSL' router into a dual-wan load-balancing router. To accomplish this the firmware turns one of the LAN ports into a 2nd WAN port. Checkout DD-WRT or OpenWRT.

And it seems that the DrayTek Vigor 2910 mentioned in your first link is actually a dual-WAN router with 'real' load balancing (not bonding).

The Vigor2910 series provides a configurable second WAN interface and supports policy-based load-balancing and connection fail-over on dual-WAN interface. Except the QoS function for the original IP layer, it also supports NAT session/bandwidth management which increases the usage efficiency of bandwidth greatly. It allows users to access Internet and combine the bandwidth of the dual WAN to speed up the transmission through the network. Each WAN port can connect to different ISPs, Even if the ISPs use different technology to provide telecommunication service (such as DSL, Cable modem, etc.).

source: amazon.com

The router even supports 3G USB modems (1 USB port only)! A quick price check showed prices between 170-260 USD. DrayTek has a Thai website.

semi-long answer...

Load balancing over two ADSL lines is not trivial.

I am no expert on this so I rely on reports and opinions found on the web. And what I find is not really conclusive.

There are dual-wan routers available that seem like a straight forward solution, however, it seems they are expensive and rare, and I even found one post that indicates that those routers require the provider (ISP) to 'bond' the two lines in order to be able to provide such service, the technology involved 'Multilink PPP' (MLPPP). I further understand that this practically only works with two lines from the same provider.

check out this discussion: http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?p=1077749

Other solutions involve a (mostly) Linux based PC as router that allows load balancing on TCP/IP level. I'm not completely sure how seamlessly and effectively this works.

Checkout this article: How To: Load Balancing & Failover With Dual/ Multi WAN / ADSL / Cable Connections on Linux

Not sure what could be done when connecting your Windows PC to the two modem/routers via 2 different network cards (two NICs in a desktop PC or wired/wireless in the laptop). Transparent load balancing will not work AFAIK, not sure if assigning connections per application is possible at all.

welo

You could run a Linux Live CD or boot Linux from USB to check if the audio problem is hardware related. If it works on Linux it is most likely a Windows software problem.

Download | Ubuntu

side note: openDNS is slower from Thailand than GoogleDNS, search the forum if you want to know details.