Ange

ROFL! And I thought it was me being new to this! Now I find I need to worship the god of dongles! I feel so much better now

Hmm thanks Martin - dark art or dark magic sums it up But having boated in the 80's when finding a pay phone was the only method of communication I am still very grateful for my rather wayward dongle

We're still experimenting on the different places to dangle the dongle to get the best reception - and we're still baffled as to the rhyme or reason. We followed all advice and bought a waterproof box to put on the roof and a cable (either 3 or 5 meter - we can't remember) to feed in through the window. Reception and speed were passable but frustrating. We had one particularly wet and windy night when I couldn't get on t'internet at all so we dismantled the set up and brought the dongle indoors to dry out as we assumed it'd go wet. Once it'd spent a bit of time by the stove I plugged it directly into my lappy and hey presto I suddenly have an excellent signal - but it's incredibly slow. When it was on the roof the signal & speed were crap so I decided to keep it indoors - at least I had a signal. But the slowness of page loading gradually wore me down so yesterday I decided that I had to try something and attached the dongle to a shorter lead and dangled it just inside the canal side window. When I connected the signal had dropped from excellent to very poor or poor, but the speed increased - when I was on the internet pages loaded instantly instead of watching that bar at the bottom for ever, but I kept getting kicked off because the signal was so poor. Tonight, just to see if it made a difference, I moved the dongle from the canalside window to its opposite number on the towpath side (a distance of 6'10" I believe). Fired up the internet again - I've just gone from "very poor" to "excellent" signal strength and it's fast!!! I'm still baffled about this stuff - please people who know about it help me with these questions Is there any correlation between signal strength and speed? Pages have loaded quicker on a "very poor" connection than on an "excellent" one at times What sort of trade off is there with an extension to dangle the dongle from? I've plugged it directly into the lappy at times and had an immediate response when it's refused to connect attached to an extension cable. I'm wondering if there's some sort of loss of power. Why on earth would such a short distance make such a difference to my signal? The canal side of the boat faces open countryside with a dirty great big aerial that gives us a great TV signal even if it's drooping into the canal. The towpath side has a hedgerow then a housing estate. Even if there's a mast that side, surely 6'10" of boat doesn't shield it? Or does it? I'm trying desperately to learn about this stuff - I really took our internet connection for granted when we were living in a house with wifi that our son had set up for us. Any insights / advice would be appreciated (in a language I'll understand please - I've used computers for years, but always as an end user) After saying my connection and speed are now excellent I'm struggling to post this - the two numbers on the Vodafone window are zero whilst its still telling me I have an excellent signal. This has happened before and I know if I persevere I'll get there, but what's going on there? And sometimes the Vodafone window boots me off and I can reconnect using the icon on the task bar - Vodafone thinks I'm gone but everything works well - I've just tried that and this may now post (fingers crossed) Still grateful to be sitting on a boat communicating with the world by the way.

Just googled Lapworth and think it's near Coventry (scuse ignorance - still a relative newby). There's no way we can get the boat down there for beginning of June but we've just acquired an L reg Corsa for not very much money, if it's still going we'll do our damnest to make our way down from Lancashire (and may even persuade banter loving son to make his way up from Kent) I do like a good banter Soldthehouse - you've gotta join us!!!

Bugger & blast (mutters stronger words under breath) I was just saying to Dave how much I was looking forward to taking part in our first BCN this year

This may be completely duff information as ours is a 150w rather than 300w invertor, but just in case there's some useful stuff ... I had a lot of problems when we first moved on the boat running the laptop off the inverter - I could charge the laptop, but it didn't have enough juice in it to run it at the same time - the inverter made a horrible shrieking noise then shut down! I did post a thread about it:- http://www.canalworld.net/forums/index.php...c=25867&hl= I'm a tad embarrassed to be posting a link to it as I made the silly mistake of opening a complicated topic when I was three sheets to the wind, and then got all tired and emotional There are some good tips there though so it's worth reading. We've got a lead from Maplins now that takes it straight from 12v to 19v and I can stay on the lappy all evening, provided we run the engine for at least two hours a day. I'd love to post a linky to it but I'm on a rubbish connection here and it'd take me ages - hopefully someone with a healthy connection will oblige

Just thought I'd post a quick update on this cos I've heard a few members say they hate unfinished stories... I think I mentioned in my OP that I'd put the lappy on a cake cooling tray and it didn't work. It actually seems to have sorted it - we're thinking that when I first put it on the tray it'd already overheated twice that evening and it was still too hot. We've found if it sits on the tray from when we first switch it on it doesn't overheat - in fact it hasn't switched itself off since I posted this thread on the forum! We are going to invest in the "cake cooling tray with fan" option and have downloaded the Speedfan software that Lady M suggested. Thanks for all the help and advice