Supportus Maximus Blog

WEP encryption or WPA encryption?

When I help people with their computers, they often ask me, "How could I have done this on my own." Unfortunately I wonder that too. If you're not a computer person, how are you supposed to knwo these things.

That's why I'm going to devote a little time on this blog to answer basic questions simply.

Here is my first one. If you have a wireless network, and your wireless router asks you if you want to put a password on it, the answer is yes and you want it to be WPA encrypted. WEP is not very secure at all and WPA is much more secure.

'Nuff said.

People often ask me about FreshBooks, what it is and why I use it.

FreshBooks is a great way for small business owners to keep track of their finances, do invoicing, and keep their hourly records and record clients online.

I like it because I can go to a work site and do work, log the details of the job and then create an invoice for the client, all from any internet connected browser. It is web based and readily available on every computer. This is what people mean when they say web 2.0. Functionality makes the web sites more into a kind of a mobile applicaion.

I have been having difficulty with my Powermac G5's finder crashing. I'm running OS X 4.10. I ran disk utility to check the permissions and it came up fine.

After looking around on the net I found that it might be the finder preferences. If they get corrupt it can crash your finder periodically.

I went into my user home folder and went to Library/Preferences. I renamed the file com.apple.finder.plist to old.com.apple.finder.plist and then.

Then I force quit the finder and all seems well.

I'll have to test it and see, but it does seem better already.

I recently bought this Netgear Powerline HD Ethernet Adapter and love it so far. If you have trouble getting wireless from one room to another and you don't want to run an ethernet cable or you can't, this is a great alternative that uses the existing electrical lines.

It doesn't always work depending on your electrical system but you'll know if it does and you'll be glad you tried it. You just plug one into an outlet near your computer and another near your modem or router and if blue lights show up then you'll know it's working.

I recently set up a linksys router as an access point on a network that already had a 2-wire router. The full blown linksys router can't act as a repeater but can be another access point. The trick is to make the linksys an access point with another name for the network. Then change the ip address to a subnet that is different from the 2-wire. If you keep the default 192.168.1.1 address on the linksys router and it's handing out DHCP to the various computers, then you'll probably conflict with the 2wire that may have the same subnet and be handing out DHCP as well.