This past Christmas season, we gifted ourselves with a headache.  Actually it was just a new router that broadcasts N, which is supposedly super fast, like lightening fast, can’t believe how fast that goes fast.  That is if you can get it working.

For the past oh say six years, we’ve used Linksys.  It’s pretty straight forward, you plug your modem into the internet hole and away you go.  Well, this time we purchased a DLink.  It’s pretty and it has some snazzy features, like a built in firewall and PoPPpOpP or something like that.  What all that comes down to for our home network is netWORK.  The router and our DSL modem had to be taught how to play nice with one another.  Which believe it or not was pretty tough.  I had to go into secret places and give the computer secret passwords and then go somewhere else and give that place a completely other secret password (and may I just add, whoever made that gaptcha stuff and put the letter o and the number 0 in there system is worthy of a beating!)

Well, the two started to play nice, though the Ipod Touch refuses to make friends with the Dlink for any extended amount of time.  It brings a whole new understanding to “fair weather friend.”  Once we got it all set up though, things have been cruising along for about a month now.  Well, on this past Friday, the system went bizerk.  We moved things around, put in more secret passwords and then finally came to the conclusion that it must be our DSL line this time.  DSL is VERY stable, we’ve never had an outage, but from what I have gathered it is a shared bandwith and if all my neighbors come home on Friday night or Saturday night and surf the web, the whole system is strained and we all suffer.  But I think that’s exactly what happened, but because the DSL is SOOOOO stable, it never dawned on me that it could be the problem.  Sometimes, in networking, it’s best to take your time and see if the problem solves itself.  Which could be exactly why it takes so long to get a computer person on the phone to help with your problems