It’s annoying that the one place in the house where I need a good Wifi signal (the living room couch) is the weakest spot in the house. It’s not like we live in a big house, either. It’s about 30 feet for the signal to travel, though it’s through two walls. I don’t know why, but today the signal is really bad and just keeps cutting in and out. It’s so bad, I’m writing this in notepad, with hopes that I’ll have a signal long enough to post this eventually.

My first attempt at fixing this was upgrading from the Internet Connection Sharing from the Airport Card I have in my G4 to a real router. Surely having a real router with a real antenna would make for a better signal. I got a SMC Barricade 7004VWBR which is nice because it has all the firewall stuff in there and a switch, so I can connect my various machines to it. Unfortunately, it didn’t help the signal. I tried fiddling with the antennae, no luck there either.

My second attempt was to buy a new PC card for my laptop. The one I had was an old Compaq one and was barely supported. So I bought a Netgear 802.11g card (hey, why not). That seemed to work better at first, but overall I don’t think it’s made much of a difference.

The weird thing is that some days it works fine, and other days it’s horrible. Our 2.4Ghz cordless phone definitely interferes with it, but only when you’re talking on it.

I’ve thought about trying to move my base station closer to the living room, but the wiring would be a nightmare. I guess my next step is to get an 802.11g router, so I can try to drown out whichever neighbor of mine who has a network called “river_rock”. Hey neighbor, my network is open, how about opening up yours so when you kill my signal, I’ll at least be able to surf!

This wifi stuff sure is cool when it works, but it’s just got to get a lot better.