I’ve been having some dead zones with WiFi in my house and I was getting ready to shell out some cash for a new wireless router. I thought I would try something else. I upgraded my Internet connection yesterday from Quantum 50 to 125. My WiFi dead zones are better Netflix, Disney +, and Zoom don’t lose connectivity. At some point I will likely upgrade the router. The CityWest technician also swapped out my problematic cable modem yesterday.
There’s you’re problem there. 
I do a lot of freelance stuff, but I have only two types of customers – free and pay through the nose. lol.
The free ones get hosted on the same server as this site. A broken laptop running esxi.
The paid ones get my 100% attention, but they pay a lot for it. They are the best customers! No complaints, no bullshit.
If someone asks me how cheap I can do a website for them, I tell them I can’t do it cheap. Maybe go ask a student or a cousin or something. I can only do expensive.
Same with fixing shit. Either it’s completely free, or it’s $50/hour more than Staples charges. lol.
I can’t afford to have cheap customers.
On an unrelated note, but, Nerd worthy, I’m really smitten by this new distro I’m trying out. I’m running Void linux on an old T410 Thinkpad. Void is very cool; it’s a completely new version of linux written from scratch, not a derivative. It has a nice package management system. It’s really worth a look.
Citywest now owns my old WISP, & uses my old office.
And 25 years later the town mayor and council are bawling their heads off for Ottawa to “make” Telus provide proper high speed access.
Ignoring the fact Evolve (Citywest) is the one up the street with local employees that already does, the Mascon cable (owned by Telus) already does, and that you can’t jam that bandwidth thru ancient copper.
So anyone interested in a 2008 Core2duo Macbook upgraded to Catalina, 6GB ram and a 250SSD? Identical one w El Capitan? A 2009 Macmini with 8GB and SSD?
Well she FINALLY wanted to upgrade to Windows10. Brought over my Mac mini but she didn’t like it. Brought the Rqspberry Pi (on it right now) as a Pi 400 was perfect and right in her budget… but, but it’s not Windows…
So her P.O.S. was so old, a Dell 160 2GB Atom box with a refurbished Win7 sticker… couldn’t possibly run Windows 10. So I slapped a hard drive into my old X2 255 (how did I manage with that so long?), stuck in her old HD to grab her files off USB2-SATA too damn slow) and made her a new machine. She’ll be happy. Known her for years, happy to pay for my time, but I know her circumstances. Her and her ancient cat, it’s a race to see which one outlives the other. I’ll let her pay whatever she can afford, no more.
Nice to see they aren’t all assholes.
Macs really are a PITA to fix. Have a late 2009 iMac that just sits on a blurry screen with the spinner on bootup. Tried the disk repair, no luck. Tried to reinstall from El Capitan USB, says installer is corrupt. Pulled out an old Snow Leopard install DVD, doesn’t show up as a boot option. Put disk in USB/DVD and it doesn’t show up either. CTRL-OPT-P-R no difference.
Power and C doesn’t work. Power and D doesn’t do anything…
Thought it might be a bad hard drive, so I booted from a cloned USB-SATA drive with El Capitan from my old Mac mini. Blurry background image and endless spinner too.
I guess the last resort is to get out the suction cups, rip it apart and try with a new SSD drive…
I wish there were the USB repair drives out there like HiRens and MediCat for Windows to just boot up and test the internal drive!
Meanwhile, my accountant customer’s Sage Premium stopped working. Sat there yapping on the phone calling Sage support, calling the registered user, not listening to me whatsoever. Program was not in the Download folder to reinstall, took 10 mins to confess she downloaded it at home to a USB stick and then opened the office safe and pulled out literally an ice cream bucket of unlabeled USB sticks of customer backups, picture saves etc. and wanted to go through them one by one… I noticed the laptop was also ungodly slow since last time I checked it and they have the cheapest Internet pkg Telus sells.
Took it home, de-crapwared it, chkdsk, sfc/dism, etc. Downloaded Sage and reinstalled it and found the papers with the registration were for Office not Sage. Still sluggish, but they had to prepare reports RFN and was still useable, so took it back to the office, plugged in the network cable, booted it tested it and even printed out a report the battery was dead they’d better get a new hard drive quickly AND for the 5th time - an external backup. And I backed the whole thing up on my home Sambaserver just in case.
I did all this as her trainee is an accounting student at CNC where they teach people who can’t use a friggin’ knobbed AM radio or an electronic calculator to do Sage. Swear to God they’ve unplugged cables, not turned on power bars, specifically asked me to call Telus and get rid of dangerous wireless and then unplugged the network cable couldn’t connect to it and called me to “fix” it.
Needless to say, they called the next morning and the student claims it doesn’t even turn on. Called later to say they’d been approved for a budget of $3000 for a new laptop which one should she buy?
She’d already been to Staples and BestBuy. Surprisingly, she remembered I told her about i5 and i7 and NOT to buy anything without an SSD. She said the salesmen were crestfalled as soon as she mentioned that and neither store had anything in stock.
But of course, she’s gonna buy a laptop that never moves off the desk ever, it will be a Dell or HP because those are the brands Jesus recommends and she’ll forget to buy a backup…
but WORSE… this endless customer that’s called me weekly to press an ON button for a whole second, or reconnect a cable she unplugged, and always pays the $50 bill for that promptly will be retiring and moving away next year!
Yesterday I upgraded my wireless network at home with an ASUS RT-AX86U AX5700 Dual-Band Wi-Fi 6 Wireless Gaming Router. I had some WiFi dead spots in my house. This unit seems to have improved connectivity. I’m happy with it so far. It’s compatible with Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.
Added later: It’s also compatible with the BSDs (OpenBSD).
Added a cheap Dlink repeater years ago as the furnace/bathroom/microwave were between the Telus wifi router and the Smart TV. Then we remodelled and TV’s at the other side of the room, I seldom use it. It does show up better in the backyard. In case we get a once per decade summer with 3 days in a row without pissing rain.
Then one day I saw WalMart clearing our Dlink powerline ethernet… for $39 I decide to try it. Added the other end in the computer room at a switch and now I have the main desktop, my pi, a spare cable for working on units and could add the wife’s iMac if I wanted. It’s way faster than the wifi. With lame Telus 15Mb there’s no point in anything but the cheapest networking hardware available.
Added an old Dell 160 to the switch as a network share the other day, I can send files easy between iPhone, iPad, Macs, PCs and the Pi.
Yeah that Telus ADSL that drops sync 10 times a day for 3-5 minutes and isn’t any faster than my WISP connection 12 years ago is ‘The Weakest Link’.
Might be time to stop fixing OP’s systems. Found myself snapping at 2 customers last week.
One wanted his drive wiped cuz he got the big screen about a keylogger being installed and he better call this number. Insisted I had to reinstall NordVPN and Eset too. Also, 15 months into lockdowns and all the chatter about Zoom meeting your grandkids, had a nice gooey chunk of medical adhesive stuck over his laptop’s camera (so the laptop in the study couldn’t spy on him in the bathtub - you know like those orbiting CIA satellites that can see up your nose from overhead).
Couldn’t explain why he needed a VPN or why he paid for it, how that antivirus was any better so I snapped and said “Well they didn’t effin work did they. Now you can save $20 a month and be sure that it was you that f***ed up, not them”… thankfully he laughed.
And the woman who just wouldn’t STFU and listen as I explained the new office computer.
She was printing out a 4 page spreadsheet, scanning each page as JPG ffs) and sending all 4 scans as email attachments. BECAUSE ‘you have to print out the whole thing’… ???
Tried to explain you CAN just print page 2 if you want, the Board reads all 4 pages so why not just attach the whole spreadsheet that’s already on the computer instead of printing scanning etc…
SHE took an accounting course for a whole year at college and that’s what they taught her and how you do it blah blah blah.
Now she’d called me in because the printer didn’t work (even though some instructions I printed out the day before were right there in front of her… did you turn the printer on and off?
YES!!! I did that SEVERAL TIMES, it DOESN’T WORK!!!
So I pointedly turned it off. Scratched my nose and turned it back on.
As soon as she heard printer startup noise and paper spewed out she jerked back in her chair- WHAT DID YOU DO???
As politely as I could, I explained I turned it off and then on. If the damned lights on it don’t go out, you haven’t turned it off. And reached for the office light switch on the wall beside her and flicked it. See? This is OFF. Flick! This is ON… then I walked out. And billed $50
Hahahaha! I really enjoy your posts, herbie! I do tech support for my wife and she’s not interested in how things work. It can be frustrating. Heh.
Edit: Added later. These days I tend not to do free IT support; I’ll just do it for family and close friends.
I mentioned a while back how I ended up with a new office laser multifunction, bookkeeper told them it was broken and they told me to order a new one. Turned out the new one didn’t work either and when I went there she was just poking the ON button not holding it down for a second. Took the old one from the recycle pile and tried it, works perfect. Got a service call AND a barely used printer out of that.
It was the same woman… can’t turn things on or off. If I hadn’t got there first, I might have wound up with TWO laserjets…
Same ppl who got a whole new computer because their laptop hard drive died. Wouldn’t STFU and listen that the hard drive is just a part, or that it ‘had got slow anyway’ because the drive was failing. Now I have a Dell 8th gen i5 I’ll pop a 256 SSD in an put in the Buy % Sell…
I wonder if they buy a new work truck because the tire Is flat and the driver told them it just doesn’t work anymore?
No, they will blame the road …
“The internet isn’t working!” when their computer won’t turn on.
Updated one Win 10 Pro laptop to 21H1. Seems okay. Will do the other laptop in a while.
OMG why did you do that, don’t you know Windows updates are dangerous!!!
Just dis 20H2 to a laptop still running 1809…
also wondered just WHY everyone must set their browser’s start page to Google? Must be so they can type in FACEBOOK or WWW.COCACOLA.COM and search for them.
(the 1809 laptop had the Firefox start page set to BING and the Edge start page to GOOGLE… 
)
The Bulkley-Nechako District is doing a FB survey on local Internet service. Check the comments for the parade of stoopid. They had a bad link on their site at first but I guess their tech decoded that from the responses…
Can’t open the link - my Internet service is crap
Can’t open the link - my internet is so bad I cancelled it
Where I live I only get three bars on my computer’s Internet. They should build more towers
BTW - the “other” bookkeeper just called. The printer doesn’t work… and equally astonished how lights work… and how backing up Simply Accounting is exactly the same on different computers (the old one was a Dell, this is an HP. How was I supposed to know?"
Arrghhhh! Working with OLD farts!
I told the wife that I am an old fart, but if I ever start acting like them to sneak up behind me and push me off the damn bridge!
Called in YET AGAIN about that office printer. Always says it’s offline when one of the two women sit in front of it. I decided that as I’d replaced their laptop with a desktop that they no long had to disconnect from everything and place in a safe, behind two locked and alarmed doors, I’ connect it USB just so they couldn’t MAKE MORE PROBLEMS.
It was set up HP’s wifi direct, about the simplest way possible and when I pulled it away from the wall to connect the USB - there was a network cable in it. It was from in a box, inside the bottom of the desk and of course “It wasn’t me, I don’t know who did that”
Then got accosted by the senior who’s daughter gave her a new computer that was ‘all set up’. And didn’t tell her the logon password. SO she phoned… and it booted Windows 10 all set up to work just like windows 8… with a Microsoft account she didn’t tell her the username. Winver told me 1903 so I took it home rebooted with a 21H1 stick and reset it to work like normal people want it to.
I’d copied her docs, pics, desktop folder to USB and put them back. Went to set up her mail…used the three logins saved in her old Chrome passwords. NFG
So I decided to install he Office, but there was an external drive in the box, not software. Underneath, YET ANOTHER password for her email than didn’t work either. I then noticed a receipts folder on the desktop and she’d told me she saved ALL the receipts from her ISP. That were sent to a slightly different email address! One that didn’t work with any of the password either. AAAIIIIEEEE…
She couldn’t tell me her password, honestly how was SHE expected to remember her password? She couldn’t even show me how she got her email, not even what she clicked on to get it. FFS her Chrome opened to an error page, she’d type www.google.com into the URL bar, then facebook into the google search and get there that way.
OMG
A post was split to a new topic: Banks blocking VPNs
Loading Win7 Starter onto an ancient AspireOne. The wife got me a Canon Selphy 15 years ago when we started dating and I pulled it out of the closet to make a high quality print of a painting of my dog.
Turns out support died at Windows 7 and no Mac or Linux.
I have hundreds of refills I scooped at a Staples clearance in Terrace many years ago and damned if I’m gonna buy the newer Selphy the little i use it. The supplies are the same on the new one though if I ever do.
I can still use it if I connect to my newer Canon camera, though with the iPhone, I use that maybe once a year. The damn thing was handy to give Mom snapshots when I saw her, but she passed almost a decade ago.
Used to be a fan of Netbooks years ago and this Acer’s too cute to ever throw out. Lives in a drawer with an original 7" EEE.
OMG it left 16K free space… so I hunted for hours for a copy of XP (tossed all mine ages ago) and used that. Installed at glacial speed! That old Atom 270… yawn.
So after day of dicking around, the Selphy’s paper feed doesn’t grip. THAT was why I shelved it years ago.
What a waste of time. Maybe i will order a new CP1300. Looks like I have $200-300 of consumables that fit one.
Get back to fixing that iMac tomorrow.