After the zillionth crash I’ve given up. I managed to get the freezing down to once every few hours but it’s not good enough. I just got the good old cat 5 cable out of the closet and connected the pc to the cable modem the old fashioned way. That seems to work very nicely. I can still use the wireless connection with my laptop from work.
Naturally, I’ll take the siemens gigaset usb stick 108 crap back to the store. See what happens. If you’ve googled for that piece of shit and read my blog posts: don’t buy it or if you bought it, trade it in for a different brand. I’ve updated everything: drivers (kt400 chipset, wlan), bios. Nothing seems to work and the pc consistently not crashes without the usb stick. It might be a compatibility problem with my motherboard, it might be faulty hardware, it might be crappy siemens drivers. My guess is the latter.
Now the only problem is the cable connection itself. That too is not working to well. I’ve had several disconnects already. The online led just goes off and the modem tries to reconnect for a while, which, so far, it manages to do after fifteen minutes or so. I suspect the cable signal isn’t to good. This is an old building after all.
I almost ordered a new PC last friday. Unfortunately the video card I wanted had to be ordered and the guy from bt-mikro (right across the street) couldn’t guarantee he’d have it within a reasonable time frame so he recommended me not to order right away. Otherwise the setup seems nice: dual core amd 4400+ with an octek motherboard, 2 GB of memory, a nice 300GB disk, a samsung 204TS 20” lcd screen and logitech mouse and keyboard (wired, I’ve had enough of this wireless shit). I’ll buy it when the video card is available again: a nvidia 7800 GT card. This card (and it’s slightly heavier brother the gtx) seem to be the card to have at the moment.
That should keep me happy for a few years. My current geforce 4200 still works very nicely despite its age. I recently played doom3 on it with reasonable framerates and some of the eyecandy turned off.
Update: hardware has been ordered now :-)