[MDA III, XDA III, PDA2k, 9090 General] quinbus_flestrin:
Now thats what I call some good advice. A lot of the topics in this board are a bit over my head... upgrading or cooking new ROMs for example... but this is good practical advice for relatively simple old boys like me.

Our police are so good at arresting people who are not criminals, and so bad at catching those who are, that it is more than likely that bandwidth stolen to upload stuff like porn would land us in prison. They are pathalogically unable to admit that they themselves lie as much as the criminals do and deliberately cause miscarriages of justice now, so unless you can produce an iron-clad case then you are stuffed. They stopped policing some time ago when they started working for the government.

Eight of them performed a judicial murder in the tube, in full view of everyone, and still they deny that they were responsible for a needless death. That about sums them up now. Overpowered and Overpowering.

Sometimes I'm glad I'm confined to the house and the locale so much.

I will certainly turn off the WiFi when not in use. Thanks a lot for the tip.

<Less dramtically there is the cost. I'm not sure what your deal is with your ISP ... but in Australia a lot of people have quota's - a given data allowance per month, after which they are either charged excess data rates or are shaped to narrowband speeds. I imagine it would suck to experience either because someone has been downloading movies over your wifi.>

Here in the increasingly Orwellian UK we use an outfit called ntl. The deal we have is £25 pm 2Gig Broadband and (as yet) no practical dload limits. Although traffic limits are in the agreements, no one so far has reported a penalty. I stayed on 512k for a while when they brought them in, as the limit on there was far higher. But next door went on the 10Gig and dloaded more in a week than I had in a year (films mostly I think) and suffered no hit from ntl.

<It is fairly simple to tunnel any kind of connection through port 80 (which is used for http). Goggle for http AND tunnel and count the hits.>

This I must look into further. Thanks.

<

There is, of course, an overhead with WEP or any other encryption scheme. I personally haven't ever had a problem, although I know some who have. >

I'll try the WEP once more.

<Generally they found updating the firmware on the router/AP end, and using the latest drivers for their client got them the best performance. YMMV of course. >

This AP/Router is UD'd to date AFAIK. Drivers for the old Jornadas are built-in to the ROM... they don't do Firmware... it's hard wired. I'll really have to retire them I suppose. They're prematurely becoming as anachronistic as my old Atari Portolio and DIPs. :-))

This is the kicker... simple, effective, and easily done by the punter. The mark of the professional at work.

<If WEP is your only common denominator and updating firmware and drivers doesn't improve your peformance sufficiently under WEP then there is one security measure that I routinely employ, which rarely seems to be mentioned. TURN THE WIFI OFF WHEN YOU AREN'T USING IT.>

<Case in point ... >

Funny you should mention flats. There are some next door and some houses on the other side.

Yesterday our XDAiis and PC notified me that a net was operational and the usual "did I want to connect". I didn't then.

However after reading your post I have.

You're right again. I needn't have bothered with all the work I did WiFi-ing, and the £40 for the AP/Router. This lets the XDA and our laptop in the upstairs sitting room on-line anyway.

My initial task was to get off dial-up in the upstairs sitting room and on to our downstairs BB account... saving the cost of the old account and the extra phone line we had put in, then to re-direct that saving to upping the BB speed.

The AP is off at night anyway... my lady won't have electrics on (aside from the phone) at night... and religiously goes round shutting them off b4 we retire.

I'm going to get my nose back into WiFi for Dummies now, and another one I just 'found' called Wireless Network Hacks and Mods. Please let me know if anything else occurs to you.

QF