New Computer, New Car, New Phone - expect to waste many man-hours on learning how to use it!
When I worked in industry and in government and at law firms, I dreaded system upgrades. "We have a new computer network, and everyone should report at 8:00 AM for system training!" they said. "How long does this take, an hour?" I asked. "No, it is all day! for the whole company!"
Do the math on that. Even a small firm of 100 people, that's 800 man-hours wasted on training. And yea, maybe these system upgrades are essential now and then. Or maybe Larry in purchasing got a free trip to Aruba from the salesman, in exchange for pushing this soon-to-be-obsolete system on our company. We may never know!
Well, I know. When I worked at GM, I had a roommate who was a purchasing agent for the plant. Around Christmastime, we would come back to the apartment to see piles of gifts against the front door. "To Nate, with thanks, Acme Industrial Supply!" one card read. "Merry Christmas Nate!" said another. Attached was a bottle of fine Scotch or a new boombox or even a portable television set. Nate's predecessor was fired for taking cash. Act shocked - this is how the world works, at least some of the time.
So all this time is lost to "upgrading" which is why I dread it. I ordered the Lithium-Ion battery pack for the buggy and part of me is excited to do the install and whatnot, while part of me dreads the part where it doesn't work and I spend a day troubleshooting.
For example, today. I ordered a new 5G hotspot - a Netgear Nighthawk 6M - which I actually bought used on eBay for a couple hundred bucks. The old hotspot seemed "slow" and the battery was puffing out (a sign you need a new battery). So we pulled the pin on 5G and thought maybe it would work better.
It might - it has external antenna inputs and I ordered the accessory antennas. We'll see if that makes it faster. For now, the bottleneck is the speed of the cell service we have. About 12MIPS down, 2MIPS up - enough to stream video seamlessly most of the time.
But the guy I bought it from shipped it with the wrong battery. I contacted him through eBay and no response - yet. A replacement battery is like $15 but it is the principle of the thing. However, I learned that the hotspot will work without the battery and will go into "6" mode (whatever that is) which is supposedly faster. Mark's phone shows this, my old phone does not.
And our tired old C655 Toshibas still use the 2.4GHz WiFi bandwidth or whatever, so you have to run the hotspot in dual band mode. My laptop logged into it with no problem.
But Mark's did not. I spent the day trying to figure out why. In a way, it was instructive as I went through all the screens on the hotspot and read the entire user manual (88 pages) that I had downloaded and put in a binder (of course). Still no joy. I tried unplugging and rebooting. I checked the settings against my computer and the only difference was that I was using a circa 2010 driver and Mark had 2012 and 2014 versions of the drivers on his machine.
His WiFi was showing WiFi from my phone and Mark's as well as the neighbors houses down the street, so it was getting WiFi but not from the new Hotspot. I rummaged around in my drawer full of Toshiba parts and found a spare motherboard and REALTEK wireless LAN card. So I removed the keyboard from Mark's machine and swapped out the LAN cards. Reboot and.... no joy.
On a hunch, I took an old CD-ROM and burned the LAN drivers from my HDD backup. I had downloaded these a while back (for the entire machine) when I created these three Franken-laptops from the parts of four that I had (hence the drawer of leftover parts). I had to uninstall the LAN card and erase both the 2014 and 2012 drivers from Mark's machine. Now the leap of faith. Windows is showing an "unknown device" and asking me for the drivers. I put in the CD-ROM and the 2010 driver installs.
And.... we have joy. I am not sure if the newer drivers somehow refused to recognize the 2.4GHZ channel on the hotspot, or if the drivers were somehow corrupted. All I know is, it works. And oddly enough, it seems to be working faster (Mark's machine always seemed slow online for some reason).
On problem with Windows is that when you click on "update driver" it just checks the date of your driver to see if it is the latest version. If your driver is corrupted, well, nothing changes. I find it highly doubtful that both the 2012 and 2014 drivers were corrupted (I tried both using "rollback"). It seems the "upgraded" driver was missing something these antique laptops craved.
But this illustrates the problem with "upgrades" - you spend hours setting up new equipment and days learning how to use it. What is really frustrating is when you learn about a feature - on your phone, for example - only months or years after you bought it. "Gee, I'm ready to throw this POS away and just found out now it has this cool feature!" It is like my friends who complained for years their Mercedes tailgate was hard to close - until I pointed out the auto-close button on the bottom. Easy-peasy! It pays to be handy.
It remains to be seen if this new hotspot works better than the old one. I suspect when we get into an area with better cell service (while traveling) it may provide us with faster service. And the antenna options are many, including magnetic car-mounts (N/A with aluminum-body pickup trucks!) or even aerials that go on a pole or something.
The new Lithium-Ion battery pack and smart charger is supposed to arrive next week. So more frustrating (and rewarding) days ahead, I guess!
UPDATE: I bought some external antennas for the hotspot and they made the signal strength worse than before! Fortunately they were only a few dollars. The hotspot was disconnecting from AT&T on occasion and after reading the help forum on AT&T I decided to try disabling the Ethernet connection (cat-5 cable) since we are using WiFi. Most of the people reporting problems on the help site were trying to use the hardwired solution. Well, anyway, it has been a week now and no disconnects! Also, 5G service - streams video much better (for the most part)! The replacement battery arrived as well - and that seems to help, too.
