Improve your broadband and wireless speed
Ofcom have just put out a useful article about improving your broadband speed. One of the not so obvious tips hidden away in there, is to raise the height of your broadband router or wireless box. We’ve found at times that this will make a massive difference on wireless range.
One specific location we looked at couldn’t even receive wifi in the adjacent rooms, until we spotted that the internet box (one of the BT hub models) was on the floor behind a set of drawers in the furthest corner We relocated it onto a shelf, 2m higher and the wireless speed improved and the range extended out to all the adjacent rooms.
We’ve moved other routers up much higher and had similar success. Sometimes there are cheap, quick solutions and you don’t need expensive equipment upgrades. However wireless is one of those unpredictable technologies that you often need to check properly in situ, we have a selection of equipment that can be loaned out for testing purposes.
Memory Sieve
- Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019 17.0 keeps re building content and effects at startupEvery time you start Adobe PhotoShop Elements 2019 (this is version 17.0 build 20180830.m.125874) you get a message and progress bar showing Building Content and Effects. This can take 2-3 minutes to complete and PhotoShop Elements isn't responsive until it completes. Almost looks like the app has frozen at times. It completes and you can […]
- Adding a Mitel 5201 phone to a 3300 controllerPreviously we've been able to just change the MAC address on the 3300 controller when we swapped out faulty phones, but had some problems with that recently. The phones were appearing on DHCP and in the unprogrammed IP phones list (see under Maintenance > IP Telephone Inventory) but weren't actually picking up the extension number.The […]
- Dell OptiPlex 7070 external speaker humming with Realtek audio driverThe external speaker on my Dell OptiPlex 7070 SFF starts humming every few minutes. A quiet low level, deep hum. Sounds a little like the speaker is vibrating on the desk. You can clear it by playing some audio or clicking the volume control button to make it ping. This is happening on Windows 11.The […]
- HP ProDesk 400 offline missing ethernet network adapterPossibly the strangest call for a while ... a cat stepped on the keyboard and the computer went offline! Tried all the obvious fixes for airplane mode, reset network, troubleshoot network, BIOS, etc, then spotted there was no ethernet device in the Network Adapters section of the Device Manager. Just the WAN Miniport drivers. You […]
- Outlook 2016 with Gmail keep getting prompted for "Sign in with your Google account" IMAPOutlook 2016 loads up with a Google Gmail or Googlemail account configured and imediately prompts with a Sign in with your Google account prompt. It happens as soon as the Send/Receive runs to download new messages. You might see error 0x800CCC0E Outlook cannot synchonize subscribed folders. If you login, it prompts to authorise Microsoft, which […]