Out of Chaos......

Ah yes..... the grinning Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park. That's what I feel like right now, or more accurately, I feel like the Sam Neill character watching the park's systems come apart around him! Let me start from the beginning..... sort of......

It's finished! Last night, the final upgrade piece for the "new" Blackbird went into place. The AMD Radeon HD 7850 graphics card. It replaced the last major component in my desktop workstation left over from the old Core 2 Quad Blackbird, the Radeon HD 7750.

The end of last week saw the 240Gb Sandisk boot drive replaced by a new Crucial 512Gb MX100. At the same time, the secondary drive changed over from the old 1Tb Hitachi DeskStar to 2, 1.5Tb Hitachi DeskStars, plus the old drive stayed in the machine as well. So the mechanical storage is at 4Tb on top of the 512Gb of SSD boot drive. Do we live in a wonderful time or what!?!

Last night, the final piece was installed. I replaced the Radeon HD 7750 with the 7850. The Windows experience index jumped from 6.9 to 7.5 with the "S" Spec i5 3450 processor being the item that kept it from maxing out at 7.9 across the board! The power/heat friendly 7750 moved over to my son's new gaming console sized machine.

So, what's all this about chaos? So far; this post sounds completely normal, right? Yeah..... that was the last thing to do before I start dismantling the office. The flooring people are coming tomorrow and I'm about to take every last bit of electronics OUT of the office....including everything in the "closet of doom"!

Networking Nirvana for $13.16

It has to start somewhere. For me, it started with this. My "Spring Cleaning" doesn't involve any cleaning per se, at least not yet anyway! It starts with cleaning up my network. As I've documented over time; I have a lot of devices. In today's world, it's not just the computers that need a network connection, it's the Blu-Ray player and the TV as well. A week or so ago while burning up 5 hours of time giving an English benchmarking test, I engaged myself in the mental exercise of how I could make my home network better and more streamlined. I found that I didn't like my "back-end" home setup.

Back when I got it, the D-Link DIR-615 was the most "N" wireless router I could afford. Although it's since been replaced, it's not really the slower N-150 that I didn't like. It was the built-in 10/100 Ethernet switch. After I picked up a dual-band N-300 router that feeds WiFi to my newer laptops, this box moved to the office to serve WiFi to the other corner of the house and to give me extra Ethernet connections to attach client computers that come in for work. Over time, I've grown dissatisfied with the slower speed of this switch as compared to the Gigabit Ethernet of my home network "backbone". I also found that I had to install another WiFi access point in the front of the house (right next to the N-300 AP) because none of our Apple devices (tablet or phones) could connect to the Dual-band running at the faster 5ghz wave length! This was an old D-Link DI-624 that I had sitting in a box; so now, there were 3 network devices in the living room! I had previously added a switch there to give me enough ports. 

This left me with a bit of a conundrum. I wanted a faster switch in the back of the house, a faster AP in the front of the house that the i-devices could connect to, and do it while cutting down the number of network devices. This is where an idea that I learned some time ago came into play. I don't remember when, but at some point in the past; I was looking for a switch, but found that they were more expensive than the ubiquitous all-in-one router/access point/switch that everybody buys. I resolved that by purchasing one of the latter and just turning off the DHCP function so it was simply a switch with a built-in access point..... which brings us back to the first image. That...... is a D-Link DIR-655 the high-end N-300 router that I couldn't afford back when I bought the DIR-615. It had/has all the bells and whistles including a 4-port Gigabit Ethernet switch! Now, several years down the road, I was able to pick it up on eBay for $13.16 after shipping. 

So, yeah...... Party Like A Vulcan/Do The Happy Dance!!! I have Gigabit and faster WiFi in the rear of the house, plus, now having moved the DIR-615 to the front where it's has replaced 2 boxes, and gives me faster (N-150) that the i-devices are happy to connect to. The ousted Gigabit switch from the front? It's moving to the network cabinet where it will give the backbone 4 more wired ports, thus allowing me to finally terminate my son and daughters rooms with Ethernet!