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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: (Bob) Zumbrunnen who wrote (23811)	12/13/2001 10:19:45 AM
From: (Bob) Zumbrunnen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110655

Got up this morning and the Earthlink software had logged that the connection had died (still good signal strength) and that it'd automatically switched to my modem, but when I started trying to surf, I was able to get a little bit of throughput, then nothing. After about 5 minutes, it prompted me to use a dialup connection and I told it to go ahead. Because of it logging earlier that it'd dialed up, maybe it does that automatically if enough time passes after prompting. Dunno yet. In any event, once it'd connected via dialup, I still had to manually switch ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) to the modem. I'll have to see if there's a tweak available to have it automatically and immediately use the dialup and switch ICS back and forth as needed. There's pretty decent cloud cover out here right now, but I would think that if my signal strength is good, that tells me the cloud cover isn't interfering with me. BTW, this dish points considerably further up from the horizon than my DirecTV dish did, so I would expect there to be less interference from clouds since it's going through them less horizontally than the old dish. I know Computer Learning probably isn't the ideal place for these posts, but I wanted to make sure I recorded a kind of DirecWay Diary somewhere for others to look at when deciding if they want to go this route. Last night I was thrilled. Right now I'm real glad I renewed my dialup ISP and if I get much more outage or slowness, I'm going to be very upset that I spent $500 upfront for equipment and $69.95 per month for access. Yeah, I know that's steep. But there are currently few, if any, alternatives for us remote folks. BTW, I just noticed that in my previous message (typed in the wee hours), I mixed up bits and bytes a bunch. And I haven't had enough coffee yet to go through it and figure out my mistakes. Suffice it to say that at times it was barely faster than my dialup and at other times I couldn't believe how much faster it was. Especially since at the peak it was going much faster than the advertised speed. Edit: It turns out you don't really need a 3rd-party util to monitor usage of the dish. You just go to Properties for the connection and check the box that says "Show Icon in System Tray" (or words to that effect), just like you do with a dialup connection. I'm surprised the tech at Earthlink didn't know that last night via chat. But no more surprised than I am that he went silent after suggesting that I check my signal strength and cloud cover.