My newsletter article "Wireless Problems Solved with New Router" motivated subscriber Len to write about his own experience. He solved a router problem in an entirely different manner…
Hi Terry,
You may remember giving me advice on opening old *.WK3 files: I did it by using Win 2000 and the, converting to Excel format.
Len couldn’t handle the Lotus 1-2-3 files because Excel does not install the "filters" for Lotus’ .wk3 files by default. Fortunately, you can install them later from the CDROM.Your recent newsletter brought back the pain of my Linksys WRT54GS, that even after updating to the latest driver, still kept loosing it’s marbles and refusing to connect.
In the end I decided to open the case and look for a battery or capacitor that may have been faulty. There were none, but two chips directly under the two hot spots on the case.
I decided that with nothing to loose, I put two rows of 3/16″ holes 1″ from the bottom at the rear and two 2″ square matrix of the same above the location of the chips. The greater number of holes at the top to encourage a flow of air over the chips. Not pretty, but effective!
This completely solved the problems.
Regards
Len
Cool! (pun intended!)
Thanks for the report, Len. Hopefully this will help some other readers to broaden their options — fixing doesn’t always mean pulling out the wallet and replacing the hardware.
Most of us know that heat is the enemy of electronics. An overheating CPU will make the computer shut itself down, and can even kill the CPU.
That’s why we need buy a can of compressed air occasionally, open our computer case, and blow the dust out of the CPU’s heat sink. A CPU fan, if it is set to blow into the heat sink, can pack the dust between the cooling fins of the heat sink.
You really don’t want to disassemble the heatsink from the CPU — and that’s the only safe way to use a brush to clean the heat sink. That’s why you can find the cans of compressed air among the computer supplies at your favorite office supply store.
Len’s solution to increase the air flow through his router is doing the same thing — he’s not installing a fan, and it’s not a dust issue, but he’s making sure that some cooling air can cool the hot chips of the router.
and