Well, it does look as though the Netgear DG834 modem is a fairly poor contender when it comes to sync speeds and throughput on ADSL2+ lines. The Billion 7300 modem that my ISP sent me outperforms the DG834 by nearly 1.5Mbit!

The DG834 came up with the following:

The Billion 7300 seems to outclass the Netgear by a fair margin:

Interestingly enough, both modems achieved a higher sync rate using ADSL1 spec than ADSL2 or ADSL2+. Looks like I’ll be staying in ADSL1 mode for quite some time :)

I finally managed to get an ADSL2+ connection to my house! This has however caused lots of frustration in getting it to work! From my research, it looks like the Netgear DG834 modem does not like a lot of ADSL2+ lines.

I have one of these modems at a friends place and it seems to sync up using ADSL2+ and gets a nice 10Mbit connection. Mine however will not sync at all in ADSL2+ mode… It’s interesting that using ADSL1 (G.DMT), the modem will sync at ~5Mbit downstream - which is what I was expecting seeing as my Cisco router would report a max attainable line speed of around 5Mbit.

If I lock the Netgear DG834 to ADSL2+ mode, it will not sync at all. I talked to Netgear about this and they did the good old “it’s the ISPs fault” and didn’t really want to hear anything more. In the meantime, I’m getting my ISP (Spin Internet - I’d recommend them to anyone!) to send me a Billion 7300 modem which they say seems to have no issues.

Will be interesting to see if the Netgear DG834 modem is just no good at ADSL2+!

I’ve been part of the Windows Vista testing program since the days it was still called Longhorn. I have to say, they’ve come a long way in that time (a what a long time it was!). All in all, Windows Vista seems to be a good step forward from Windows XP - although there are going to be a number of things that annoy the seasoned Windows user.

1) Wireless Networks - At the moment, there is no way to tell an adhoc network from an access point. This means it’s potentially easy to trick people into trying to associate with an adhoc network and not what they are actually wanting to connect to. This becomes more interesting if the same SSID is used between the AP and the attacker - as Vista will prefer the stronger signal - which may be either of the two networks.

2) Windows Sidebar - I am yet to find a good reason to use this. It’s slow, limited and steals screen real-estate without adding much usefulness. Indeed this would have been better implemented with something more like OSX’s Dashboard - however even an option just to hide the sidebar off the screen when the mouse is not near it would be a great improvement. Thankfully, it can be disabled easily.

3) The Start Menu search - This is one of my pet hates. After years of being used to pressing Win -> U -> U to shutdown the computer, this no longer works. If you press the Windows key then type ‘u’, you now end up searching the start menu, favourites (bookmarks) and web history. While this may not be a bad feature, it’s annoying when you’ve been using that key sequence for years!

4) User Account Control - Although I understand the reasons for Microsoft to make this move - making a more secure system by trying to separate system permissions from user permissions, the UAC pops up all over the place - from simple things like defragmenting your hard drive to changing font DPI. The worst part of this is that the UAC prompt is modal - meaning that you MUST pay attention to it when it comes up - you can’t just do something else and ignore the prompt.

There are a few more slightly annoying things, however in the whole, things seem to work ok. My test machine for Windows Vista is a 2 year old Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop with a 1.7Ghz Pentium M CPU, 1Gb of RAM and a Radeon 9600 video card. The performance rating is 3.5, however it’s still easily quick enough for everyday use - even when using the Aero theme.

After well over a year of research and trying to make Apple accountable for faulty firmware in some of their computers, I have finally given up. Apple still refuse to admit to any problem on these drives, and sadly I must devote time to other projects.

From the superdrive site:

Update 28/01/2007 02:47am (+11 GMT)

Well, it looks as though Apple won’t do anything about this problem. What I can advise however are a number of brands that do work accordingly - and why.

It seems that Apple only support media created by the CMC factory. Discs made by this factory (and banded as other labels) seem to work fine in the drive. CMC make the Verbatim and possibly LG, SHINTARO, TDK and some DATACELL discs.

This means in theory, any of these discs that happen to come from the CMC factory should work fine. Anything else, and you’ll get 2x burns.

Looks like Air Services Australia has updated their DAPs page with all the airport charts for Australian Airports. To reflect this, I’ve re-run my script to combine them all for us flight sim pilots who like to use them for procedural approaches and departures from airfields.

You can find them here.