Following on from my earlier post about the NB9W hanging, I plugged the NB5Plus4 I borrowed and set it up in bridge mode, which means I disabled it’s router features and just ran it as if it was a standalone modem. I connected my existing wireless router, an old school Microsoft MN-500 I got years ago when I worked in the US, and everything connected. But, I was on a miserable 3700/256kbps. This was on last Wednesday.

I called the TPG helpdesk at their opening time of 8am sharp. The tech support guy listened, then put me on hold for 10 minutes. After that, he said check your modem again we have changed your profile on our side of things and now you should have better upload speeds. I checked and indeed it was true but when I started surfing the net it wasn’t stable. He got me to try pinging the tpg site and I kept getting timeouts.

He put me on hold again, and after another 10 minutes, he said the engineer tried a number of things but finally set me at 4000/512kbps as it was the most stable. He said it was probably something wrong with the Netcomm.

In the afternoon, it hit me. I should’ve just had everything run standalone on the Netcomm. Maybe my old Microsoft router didn’t know how to authenticate with TPG over ADSL2+. When I got home, I set everything up to run off the Netcomm, then the next day I called TPG again at 8am.

This time, the tech support person was a pleasent sounding female who asked me the typical questions from the support script. Do I have everything powered on, have I tried an isolation test, do I have any other devices sharing the line etc. I had shared the same line with my cordless phone and fax machine before, but for the purpose of the test I disconnected everything so the NB5Plus4 had the whole line to itself. I also played dumb about what happened the last time but unfortunately I made a fool of myself as she could see records of my call!

I complained about the upload speeds and she put me on hold while she got an engineer to do something on the TPG side. Basically, what I found out from the Whirlpool forums was that they tend to cap your speeds to ensure stability. Once the engineer changed my profile, my modem reported that I was running in ADSL2+ mode instead of G.DMT and guess what mum my speeds went up to 5000/1000kbps! My attentuation and snr figures were more decent too.

But I didn’t stop there. I hunted around the house to see where my Telstra phone line was at and found it at a very convenient location. I then discovered I only had 2 ports for that phone line in my house. I was able to do a true isolation test, having the phone line go directly to the DSL modem, and my speeds went up to 6500/1000kbps. It’s nothing compared to some of the speeds others are getting but it’s good enough for me.

I then decided to buy a new modem router of a different brand. Actually, the friends who loaned me their NB5Plus4 also had upgraded to TPG ADSL2+ and wanted their modem back so I was forced to start hunting. I heard good things about Speedtouch, but apparently their authentication mechanisms are not compatible with TPG. I then decided to go with the Dynalink RTA1025W. I picked that up as well as a central splitter from Cormain, and I recommend this retailer to anyone in the market for anything ADSL related. These guys know their stuff.

When I got home, I hooked everything up and it was all sweet. All was well, I was getting about 4800/1000kbps, but yesterday I found out TPG had once again dropped me to 512kps upstream and my modem was on G.DMT modulation. I tried forcing the modem to connect on ADSL2+ but it wouldn’t connect. A 8am phone call to their helpdesk this morning got it resolved, and I sit here wondering when and why TPG would drop me to 512kbps upstream again. Maybe there’s something on their system that detects if there are frequent disconnects and drops the speeds to ensure stability.

Having installed countless number of ADSL modems for non-techy friends, I thought the NB9W would be pretty straight forward. Plus the phone line in, plug my network cable in, go to the web admin page and enter my TPG username/password and I’d be ready to rock-n-roll.

But I could not connect to TPG. The line would drop out and cause the NB9W to hang. After 2 hours of experimenting with different things, I gave up and read the User Guide, only to find out that you were supposed to connect another phone line to the LINE Port, even if you did not intend to use the VoIP features. When I did that, I could connect!

I was pretty excited, and began to configure the router with my port forwarding rules, then configured the wireless network settings to work with the other computers in the house. But as I started to use the NB9W, it was very unstable.

Basically, it would hang, and while it could still dish out IP addresses, no computer could access the internet and I could not access the web admin page. Only by pulling the power plug out and restarting the NB9W would get it to work, but then once again the same thing would happen periodically.

I could not isolate the problem to anything in particular. I upgraded the firmware to no avail. I suspect it may be due to the fact that I daisy chained another network switch to it, and that somehow the NB9W was designed to work by itself. Of course, this is another one of my own theories that has no scientific merit.

Fortunately, I was able to return the NB9W for a full refund, even though I had to practically dance naked to get it.

At the moment, I’m running my connection with a NB5Plus4, on loan from friends who are also waiting to upgrade to ADSL2+. I’m in the market for a new modem router, but have no idea what to get. The DLinks and Netgears are pretty out-of-date and the Billions are looking good.

What are my speeds like with ADSL2+? A miserable 4000/512kbps. More on that another time… I’m trying to see what I can do to fix it and will blog about my experience when I’ve given up or gotten it to work.

The D975BX was very short in supply in Sydney as it was in high demand, but I was able to get one from Umart. My sources tell me only OEM versions of the board is available in Australia, hence all I got was a lousy brown box with boring red SATA cables, floppy and ide ribbon cables, a back panel, 2 cd-roms and 2 raid driver disks and one sticker detailing where to plug things in.

Once I installed the board and plugged everything in, I installed Windows 2003 Server (my OS choice) and attempted to install the LAN drivers from the cd-rom, so I could download updated ones from Intel later. I experienced the same problems reported by Toms Hardware. But I was able to download drivers from my existing computer and got everything installed.

After a couple of hours, I had a couple of blue-screen-of-death occurences. The system hanged at different times and eventually I could not boot into Windows. My attempts to reinstall proved to be futile as well, with Setup complaining files were corrupted etc. I then realised it was probably faulty ram, and when I removed one DIMM everything was fine. When I added it back in I got errors.

I had the ram replaced at Umart, and reinstalled everything and things were okay for a couple of hours with the new ram. All of a sudden I had the same problems. I realised it was the Intel board that was killing the RAM, the third slot to be exact.

By this stage, I had wasted too many hours and was really fed up. I went back to Umart and returned the board and ended up getting an ASUS P5WD2-E Premium. The ASUS came in retail packaging, complete with manuals, software and good quality cables, and was just slightly more expensive than the Intel board.

I’ve had the computer for 2 weeks and have no problems whatsoever. I still think Intel boards are good, and was just unlucky with this one. And the was a Desktop Control Panel app from Intel had stress testing and benchmarking software from this Australian company (forgot the name) which was pretty cool.

One thing to note for those who are planning to get an Intel D975XBX. You need to plug in not only the main cable from the power supply but also a secondary one that supplies additional power. Most newish motherboards are the same but get this… the D975BX has a 3 pin one as opposed to a normal 2 pin. This power adapter came with my new Antec Smart 2.0 500W power supply but if you’re reusing parts you probably won’t have it and won’t be able to power up the board. I have not seen these adapters available for sale anywhere. And I’ve gone through this lengthy explaination only because I don’t know what to call these cables.

Nothing was wrong with the drive, as it worked on every other computer. I had admin access to the machine, which runs WinXP Corp. Tried everything from reinstalling USB drivers, uninstalling hardware in Device Manager etc to no avail.

So I gave up and just left it for a couple of weeks, and yesterday I wanted to do a search on google for something, and IE’s autocomplete came up with the term I used before relating to this. My trigger happy finger on the Enter key fired off this search by accident, and a couple of new entries from some forum came up.

One of the guys basically said he powered off the computer, pulled out the plug from the socket, and left it for half an hour. When he powered everything back on, his USB drive got recognised.

I had little faith, but left with no further options, and nothing at work to look forward to, I did the same before I left yesterday, came back this morning and tested.

IT WORKED! Hooray! Everything’s back to normal now.

Thinking about it, it does make sense. The computer doesn’t really power off completely while it’s still plugged in… and maybe the power supply wasn’t sending the right voltage to the USB ports and had to be reset… of course all that doesn’t matter cause it works now!

Had a new server set up for work today, and installed Windows 2003 Server Web Edition. It was a test server, and I wanted to install SQL Server 2000 to have the web applications all run on the same box.

But double clicking on x86\sqlsetup.exe resulted in the error message “Windows cannot open this program since it has been disabled”.

I then remembered that Win2k3 Web Edition is a cheaper, scaled down version of Win2k3 Server that’s intended to run and host web applications. I reckon other non-Microsoft apps like MySQL will install just fine, but don’t take my word for it.

A quick google search brought me to the MSDN link.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/819258

Then I found out it was because of the NVidia drivers I recently installed. NVidia adds this service called the “NVidia Display Driver Service” that gets start automatically. Why is does that, I will never know.

A quick disabling of the service resolved the problem.