Satellite Internet Is Working

We had a lot of snow on Sunday and most of it was still on the ground Monday morning; so I was really expecting the installer from Little Rock to call and reschedule his trip up to our ranch. Much to our surprise, he pulled up in front of my office at 12:30 and we promptly got to work installing everything. I can really understand why the satellite companies no longer allow do it yourself installations. It was very complicated, especially calibrating the dish for the strongest signals.

I had been told that the system didn't support Windows XP and was thus planning to install the satellite connection on my old box running Windows ME and then network it to all of the other computers in the house. The installer said that he has set up several on XP machines; so that's where we started.

Jason, the installer from Broadway Satellite did an excellent job mounting the satellite dish on the wall outside of my office, drilling a hole through the logs & wall for the cables and setting everything up. The speed we registered right off the bat was phenomenal compared to what we have been used to. He warned me that the first hour would be slow because the main office would be tweaking the settings for our account. I didn't mind a bit, because a download speed of 335kb was a huge improvement over the normal 31.6kb speeds we usually have on our dialups. Jason used two websites to check the speeds, this one and this one. Very handy.

As luck would have it, I started having problems keeping the connection alive on my XP system shortly after Jason left. Wisely, he had connected a very long set of cables and I was able to move the transmitter & receiver boxes over to my ME machine. After a few hours monkeying with the Internet sharing settings on both the ME & XP, I finally have it working simultaneously on both. Tomorrow, I will add Sherry's XP machine to the mix and we'll get a chance to see how it functions with two users online at the same time.

The number of email accounts has grown even more. Earthlink gave us nine accounts with that signup last week, and now DirecPC gave us five more. Add those to the 20 accounts we have for each of our two main web sites, and we should never run out of email accounts.

KMK
- posted by Kerry M. Kerstetter, MBA~CPA~ATP~ATA @ 1/07/2002 09:44:00 PM Send this post: