Grrrrr.
Most of the time this China Unicom CDMA card works fine. It's not all its cracked up to be, I mean, there claim of it being "not as fast as broadband, faster than dial-up" means in reality "About the same as dial-up, sometimes a little faster, occasionally much slower, sometimes you'll have full signal but no bandwidth at all, sometimes you'll have absolutely no signal." Anyway, most of the time it works.
But sometimes.....
You can't leave the card in the computer when you turn it off. You have to pull it out when you get off line and put it back in when you want to get online. Why? If you leave the card in, it's liable to do really stupid shit like delete all your cookies (no big deal) or delete all your bookmarks (amazingly infuriating) when you shut the computer down.
Occasionally, not very often, but occasionally, it'll freeze the computer. The solution is to pull the card out. This magically unfreezes the computer, but, of course, you have to go through the rigmarole of getting back online, which, depending on what you're doing online, can be quite frustrating.
Occasionally, again, not very often, but occasionally, when you push the card in to get online, it'll crash the computer. This happened to me yesterday and again today. It's rare that this'll happen two days in a row. In fact, it'll happen only once a month on average, and it freezes the computer even less often, but it's bloody infuriating when it does happen.
I hope this is not doing any lasting damage to my computer. That would really, really piss me off. So far it seems to be alright. Whatever causes the computer to freeze or crash seems to be a very temporary error, and restarting seems to get everything back to normal. But still.......
And not only did the card crash my computer this morning, but when I first tried to get online there was no signal. I had a nine o'clock appointment with the boss, so I just plugged in the phoneline and dialled up, hoping that the signal would be back when I got back from talking to the boss. See, sometimes the signal craps out for a few seconds. Sometimes for a couple of minutes. That happens fairly regularly. You just keep reloading stuff until the signal comes back, doesn't take too long. Then occasionally the signal will crap out for half an hour or an hour. Every now and then it'll be gone for an entire day. So I keep this dial-up connection (95963 for username, password, and number to dial- but don't use it for anything more than an emergency back-up, it's not cheap) for those times the signal craps out for the day. It doesn't happen often, but often enough.
Grrrrrr.
Still, back online now, so no big deal.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
You might try switching to a different card. There seems to be a pretty wide range of quality in the software and drivers that are packaged with the cards, and it wouldn't surprise me. The Sierra card for China Unicom that I used to use with my office PC was trouble free. So, by and large, is the Vtion USB version I use now (although its software is clunkier). But some of the ones I experimented with were crapola.
Yeah, it sucks to spend another 600 or 800 on a card. On the other hand, perhaps you can find one that won't eat your cookies. Won't change the bandwidth tho.
Thanks for the tip, Will, I might look into it. Actually, most of the time this card works just fine, it's just every now and then that it fucks up. Certainly not often. And so far it's only eaten cookies, and worse, bookmarks, when it's left in when I shut the computer down. Well, the card will age and will require replacement at some stage, so I guess looking around for something that works a little better would be a good idea.
Post a Comment