Saturday, April 6, 2013

Rogers Speedboost

Rogers have this technology that will allow your internet connection to “punch above its weight” when the cable is not saturated. This is automatic and everyone benefits.

Since dropping back to 45Mb/s from 75Mb/s, we have not really noticed any significant degradation in the overall performance of our link. And in fact, I have noticed some significant improvements when uploading images to my gallery, for example, as the result of doubling our upload rates. So the new speeds are actually quite impressive and I would encourage those sticking to their older plans to consider dropping a level to get the faster uploads and the unlimited download caps.

This morning, I recovered from a severe crash that caused my machine to not be able to recognize the disks last night. I had to let it sit overnight for it to again see them (this has happened before and is a peculiarity of this early Gigabyte AM3+ motherboard.) The AHCI drivers also seem to not work (they have a new AHCI BIOS version coming in the next BIOS, but it is a beta right now and there is no way I am going to go for that pain.) So I had to continue to run native IDE, which I believe is slower than AHCI, which mimics SCSI.

Anyway, all is well again and I have removed the bluetooth dongle, which caused three crashes prior to last night’s near-fatal one. Enough is enough so I am withdrawing my recommendation to look at the Kinivo dongle. For me, it has been a POS.

But the last thing I tried to see if the machine was fully healthy was speedtest.net … and wow!

Now that’s what I’m talking about Smile… and this service is costing me less than I was paying last week. Go figure …