...stuff I do and things I like...

Tuesday, December 20 2005

770: wireless speed issues

while playing around in my home network I noticed that wireless is kind of slow, I only have 1.5Mbit DSL so I didn't noticed it before. But now I tried to download stuff from my laptop via FTP and boy this sucks. I did a few tests with different security settings, since I use WPA and WPA is done in software, I though this could be the problem. Here are the results:

setup
    WRT54GS - with wrt-dd #22 prefinal4
    computer running Debian with proftpd (xinetd)
    N770 with Opera as ftp client
tests
    WPA-PSK TKIP+AES
    ftp ~80KB/s (cpu maxed out)

    WPA-PSK TKIP
    ftp ~150KB/s (cpu maxed out)

    WPA-PSK AES
    can't connect

    WEP 104bit
    ftp ~400KB/s (peek ~560KB/s)

    WEP 40bit
    same as for 104bit

    NONE
    same as for WEP

I didn't try WPA-EPA (radius). Also I noticed that the download destination also impacts the speed. When writing to memory I couldn't get more then 160KB/s, so all test downloads were done to MMC.

770: be nice to enjoy

after all the bashing against some of the 770 bugs I again have something nice to say about it. I finally installed FBReader and a bunch of e, pdfs and html-books. Now I use it as a handy reference manual, search ability is so great (let's quick check which RFC xyz was specified in). It's not perfect yet (perfect does not exist...).

To enjoy your 770 even more you need to be really nice and: don't open multiple websites at the same time (most of the sites just have too much junk and make opera eat your memory), be patient if things seem to hang it will recover faster if you don't try to switch apps, open the menu or change back to normal screen. Disabling flash in opera is also a good idea (I don't like it anyway - sometimes only for games).

Also by now I prefer the 770 over my h6315 for listening to podcasts. The 770 doesn't completely freeze when playing mp3s. It now happened multiple times that it suddenly stopped playing, every time I thought damn it it crashed again. But it didn't I only drained the battery to the ground - I guess thats a good sign :-)