I Want This?
The holiday season is coming up very very soon. Heck even six aisles of Walmart is dedicated to Christmas already. With that in mind I knew mom would be asking for a Christmas list. Right now my list is very diversified. So much that I know for a fact I will be getting clothes for sure.
One thing on the list that is a big item in my eye yet small. It is the ASUS Eee Box. It is a tiny little box with notebook parts in it. A small but hefty 80gb HDD that could easily be used as for network storage. Built in wireless that is compatible with b, g, and n which is somewhat future proof. I have massive love for the gigabit LAN connection. Plus the other connections that a notebook would have like USB, DVI, and a card reader.
Right now between Amazon.com and Newegg.com they are running at $300 for the 80gb, 1GB DDR2, and XP Home. Seems like a sweet deal for a little pc would save over 90% in electricity than running my current rig. But still… $300 for a once-a-week pc?
I want this PC for running Boinc and Boinc only. It would be dedicated to running it 24/7. Right now when I leave the house and my rig is running, I let it keep running. I let it run for hours with Boinc running my CPU at 100%. Does wasting primo electricity justify the hope of helping mankind in distributed applications? In my eyes no. That is why I believe the Eee Box would be a great addition to my little network.
Should I Be Ashamed?
While living in this small dinky town I have grown to realize my faults. One is that I tend to hate any product in Walmart even though that is really the only place to shop. The one thing I used to cringe at is the sight of the Linksys display. All those blue boxes looking down at you screaming, “I’m a blue collar worker just like you!” I never thought I would buy one until the new apartment came along.
Back in my old place I used a D-Link DGL-4300. I loved it. The software was a breeze to navigate through. They even had a list of specific games that if you played you could open their ports with a click of the mouse. Easy! The only real problems I had with it was the LEDs on the front were very very bright. When I moved out I just left it there knowing I did not want to hassle with getting them a new router all setup. They tend to get cranky when the internet is down for a few moments of their lives.
So now my girlfriend and I got our own place. Things are on the up, up, up! AKA spending all my money was on the up, up, up. The budget was very tight for a new state-of-the-art router. While I would have loved to get a 802.11n network going, my main concerns were three things.
- 1. The girlfriend needs to have good access where ever she may be in the apartment.
- 2. My computer and 360 need a wired connection.
- 3. I would really like some control of the QoS.
I remember reading an article back in the day about turning a $60 router into a $600 router by changing firmware and some tweaking. The article was written back in 2006 so the first thing I did after finding it was to read the comments. It is always a good idea to read the comments that are the newest to make sure something else isnt out there. Sure enough I found an updated article that used a new kind of firmware called Tomato. This firmware seems to be more what I want while the other, DD-WRT, had a lot of features I didn’t plan on using. Plus Tomato gave you charts! Always a plus when you can actually ‘view’ your network.
At Walmart I grabbed the only Linksys Wireless router they had. Took it home to set it up to find out that Tomato did not work with my version 7.2. I had never worked with the linksys default software so I had to check that out. While it wasn’t as smooth sailing and had a few problems, I would recommend it for beginners. The software has stuff to change in the middle with a description of what it does on the side. Pretty handy if you didn’t know what the stuff did.
While keeping the default firmware router I do plan on buying a older version router off of ebay to play around with when no one really needs the internet right away.
