Internet Speed

 Technology  6 Responses »
Feb 252011
 

I was reminded again today of the old adage that even when you think you know what the prob­lem prob­ably is, until you meas­ure it, you’re likely to be wrong. This applies par­tic­u­larly to factors that impede your inter­net speed.

The ADSL inter­net band­width pack­age we signed up for, many moons ago, was 3 Mbps. I know, that seems laugh­ably slow to many of you, but I don’t down­load video much and it’s adequate for my needs. On a whim, Tim decided to test the speed and found it to be only 1.14 Mbps (even when tak­ing out everything in the way, such as fire­wall and router). We tested a few times, and got sim­il­ar res­ults. So even­tu­ally we called up the ISP and com­plained, they ran their tests and found noth­ing, and as a last resort from their side, offered to send us a new modem.

Now the mod­el I had was less than a year old, a Thom­son Speedtouch ST516 V6, which I’d bought when I had trouble con­nect­ing last year. So I was doubt­ful that it would turn out to be an issue with the modem, more con­cerned that it might be an issue with the phone wir­ing in this old house. But hey, it does­n’t hurt to try a new modem, so we agreed.

A couple of days later, a new Thom­son Speedtouch ST516 V6 modem shows up in the mail. I plug it in, run speedtest.net again, and all of a sud­den we’re get­ting 2.12 Mbps, a good-sized increase and much closer to what we’re pay­ing for. (The house wir­ing and vari­ous oth­er factors prob­ably make up the rest).

So now I’m puzzled. Two modems, from the out­side exactly the same, with the same mod­el num­ber, bought 11 months apart, with very dif­fer­ent res­ults. It’s not like there are user-con­fig­ur­able jump pins on the back that could be set wrongly. The only thing I can think of is that I got a dud with the first modem. Any­one have oth­er explanations?

Word 2010 and Thunderbird 3

 Technology  1 Response »
Feb 142011
 

My major cli­ent uses mostly Microsoft products: Out­look + Exchange and Office. It turns out that the com­pat­ib­il­ity with Open­Of­fice is lim­ited when it comes to large doc­u­ments and defined styles, so I upgraded my old Office 2003 to Office 2010 on my Win­dows 7 PC desktop. And then ran into anoth­er prob­lem: file cor­rup­tion in email attachments. 

I use Thun­der­bird 3 to fetch mail via IMAP from the Exchange serv­er, but every time someone sent me a Word doc­u­ment, I’d get this error mes­sage about not being able to open it in Word 2010 because it was cor­rup­ted. If I used the Out­look Web Access cli­ent it worked fine, so it was­n’t a cor­rup­tion at the serv­er. And Word 2003 used to open the same types of doc­u­ments sent to me by the same per­son, so at first I wondered if it was some­thing to do with Word’s upgrade.

Hunt­ing around Moz­il­la’s getsatisfaction.com web site gave me a point­er to Spe­cial Thun­der­bird IMAP Set­tings at the Michigan State Uni­versity’s Phys­ics-Astro­nomy Com­put­ing Sup­port Site (they have inter­est­ing art­icles on lots of related issues). Basic­ally, the issue is due to Thun­der­bird chunking the file as it pulls it down from the serv­er, which intro­duces some cor­rup­tion. The same appar­ently also applies to using the Gmail IMAP serv­er, although I haven’t noticed any issues with that. 

To fix it, go into Tools…Options. Select the Advanced tab, click on “Con­fig Edit­or”. Search for chunks. Click on the res­ult­ing set­tings to make sure they’re all set to “user set” “false” (they will be in bold once this is done). Close the win­dow and press OK to save. I then restar­ted Thun­der­bird to be on the safe side (not all con­fig set­tings take effect without a restart and I did­n’t feel like test­ing it). Then (and the web page I linked to did­n’t include this step), right-click on the account name in the list of accounts/folders on the left (in the stand­ard win­dow con­fig­ur­a­tion), and choose “Prop­er­ties”. You should see a “Repair Folder” but­ton. Click on this to make Thun­der­bird fetch everything again, with the new settings.

Prob­lem solved! I still don’t know why Word 2010 had prob­lems with doc­u­ments that Word 2003 could read, but I don’t care enough to try to find out.

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