Following up on my post about setting up Wireless networking, I wanted to relate a recent problem I have had.
On occasion, the wireless networking was a bit hit and miss. In particular, the two iPads I have didn’t want to connect. Resetting the router was the only way to resolve.
The router in question is a Draytek 2830vn. I loaded up wireless settings and set the mode to 11n only. This appears to have done the trick. 11n is the latest wireless networking standard of the options listed.
Its important for developers to have fast machines. I tend not to go for the absolutely latest tech. but my machines are always fairly up to date and new.
I’ve used Intel based motherboards for a while which have Intel Rapid Start technology, the idea being that you have a SSD drive that is used to copy the entire RAM of the machine when the computer sleeps so that waking up can then be really fast.
Yesterday I upgraded my Windows 7 development machine to 32GB of RAM from 16GB, which meant I had to resize the partition that Intel Rapid start uses on the startup SSD. This got me thinking.
The configuration is two 512 GB Samsung SSD’s in RAID mirror format that contains my C (Boot) drive and E (data) drive along with a 60GB OCZ SSD that I use for the D (temp) drive (this is a throw back from my Unix days although Windows doesn’t properly use the temp drive at least I can re-install the OS without losing my data on E).
I cursed it at times because I had forgot you have to add a margin to the size of the partition used for Rapid Start. I added 6GB in the end so 40GB to handle my 32GB of RAM.
Anyway, I timed the machine waking up from sleep without the Intel Rapid Start technology enabled. It took 10-11 seconds. When I eventually finished cursing and got Intel Rapid Start working, I found the wake from sleep time was 30-35 seconds, and when the login screen appeared, it annoyingly wouldn’t let me type for another 10 seconds or so.
I then went to my other development machine, which has a similar chipset, but Windows 8.1 and Seagate 1GB Hybrid drives and turned off the Intel Rapid Start. The wake up from sleep time went from around 20 seconds down to 6 seconds.
So the moral of this story? It is to practice what I preach! I never ever consider code optimisation without measuring the performance first to find out where the code is slow and if its worth optimising. However I had been waking both my machines from sleep every day and wasting 30 seconds for no reason because I hadn’t recently checked the performance since upgrading my drives about 2 years ago!
I have developed with two or three screens connected to my PC (or laptop – using Matrox’s excellent Dual Head 2 Go) for many years. Like desk space, my view is you cannot have enough screen space to help keep organised and productive.
Recently I took the plunge and purchased a 4K screen from Amazon. Some motherboards have HDMI outputs, which support 4K, but my main PC has not, and as I use multiple screens in any case, I purchased a NVS510 quad port 4K card that can run 4 x 4K screens if necessary. At the moment it is running 3 screens: my 4K screen and two 1920 x 1200 screens on Windows 7.
I chose the screen based on the reputation of the manufacturer and the fact that this screen has many different ports on it, so I can use HDMI to plug my Macbook in, and even split screen between two inputs (doubt I’ll use this I prefer more not less screen space).
The results are amazing the 4K screen is exactly 4 times the screen area of 1920 x 1080 screens, so I could have stopped being greedy and replaced my 3 screens with the one 4K screen and almost gained an additional screen to boot. But its good having one 1920 x 1200 at least because I can get the main Visual Studio window I’m working on up on that screen and really focus on the code in that window.
What I did find was that with Windows 7 the text on the 4k screen was a little on the small side if I didn’t want it to be too big on the 1920 x 1200’s. Windows 8 is better in this respect because it allows you to set your text size individually on each monitor.
The images above show a comparison. This blog is shown maximised on the Samsung, with the same size window on the 4K screen alongside.
An old, but useful podcast on developer hardware and screen space (multiple screens) can be found at Hanselminutes #74.
N.B. When considering the DualHead2Go, please check your display output on your PC, you may prefer a display port version of this product.
I just wanted to relate this snippet of information. Often you get wireless networking gear and they are notoriously difficult to set up, the instructions often translated from chinese. Its only in recent years that I learnt of a good way to setup repeaters, which I have not seen in the instruction manuals.
Imagine you have a wireless network with a wireless access point at home. The signal strength is low in parts of the house, so what can you do about it?
So whats the snippet of information I hear you ask? I always wondered how best to set the wireless networking repeaters up. The problem being if you use a different SID, the signal has to disappear altogether before your device even thinks about connecting to the repeater. Response times have long since gone really slow so you have to keep changing the Wifi source as you walk around the house with your iPad.
The best way to my knowledge is to Use the same SID in all devices but use different channels. So if the wireless access point uses SID A, channel 1, you could set up the repeater to receive from SID A channel 1 but transmit on SID A, channel 10. The same concept works if you have two access points in your house connected by a cable or mains networking – use the same SID but different channels.
This is helpful when you are walking around the house with your iPad because the iPad will go to the strongest signal, and will switch channels a lot quicker than switching SID’s. In fact, as related the original network usually has to be totally unavailable to get most devices to switch SID’s and even then it can take a few seconds.
Might be obvious to some, but it wasn’t to me until a couple of years back. Hope this helps somebody.