Our RV Adventures

to quote a famous fishheaded Admiral.

Since I’ve been downloading so many updates and upgrades to our granddaughter Piper’s laptop, and since the 3G and 4G internet service here at Lake Conroe is so sucky, I was considering subcribing to the park’s new FAST WAVE Wi-Fi service.

Nobody at the park seemed to have any idea what kind of speeds I would be seeing, and there was not a phone number or email address on the signup site to ask them.

So after waffling a bit, I logged in and signed up, paying for 1 week at $14.95.

Big mistake.

As soon as I got online, I first went to Speedtest.net to check the speed. And immediately decided the service was misnamed.

SLOW WAVE was more like it. Kind of like Jumbo Shrimp or Pretty Ugly.

Speedtest showed me about 2.5 Mps, slower than I was getting at Colorado River on 3G, must less the 30 – 40 Mps I was getting on 4G. The only thing actually faster was the Ping time. It was 20 ms rather than the usual 100 ms I get on 4G. That means when you click on something on the web, it will only take 20 thousandths of a second, rather than 100 thousandths of a second, for something to happened. Big Whoop!

The only redeeming thing, and the reason I didn’t call and cancel immediately, was that it does take the load off our Aircard bandwidth, so we’re not slowed down while the laptop is updating.

As it was, I spent a good part of the afternoon downloading about 1.5GB of 216 Win7 updates and gettng them installed. Now I’m still trying to get all the drivers installed, but they don’t make it easy.

As I figured, our ‘power problem’ that we had at Colorado River has not happened here. This afternoon both the front and rear a/d units were running, so I cringed as Jan started the microwave. And . . . nothing. No problem at all.

So it’s all Colorado River’s fault.

Thought for the Day:

A society grows great when old men plant trees, in whose shade they know they will never sit.

adsfadsf

and Internet Connections?

First up, night owls and early risers may have noticed that I didn’t upload the blog last night as usual. Don’t know what problem was, my blog writer program couldn’t connect to the blog server. But it worked fine this morning about 7am.

Jan and I were both up at our usual travel-day 6:30 am, and pretty much ready to roll by about 7:45. But we wanted to make our regular visit to have the breakfast buffet at Schobel’s Restaurant down in Columbus.

But they usually don’t have the buffett set up until about 8:30, so we waited to until about 8:15 to leave the rig.

It’s hard to believe they can put together this good of a buffet for only $7.95. Scrambled eggs, (or you can order them the way you want them. No extra charge.), potatoes and onions, grits, crispy bacon, patty sausage, link sausage, grilled ham, chicken fried something (pork, chicken, or steak. It varies), sausage gravy, biscuits, and bread pudding.

Really good.

Back at the rig, we were hitched up and leaving the park by 10am. The trip was pretty uneventful except for the usual windy conditions. And as usual, it’s always a headwind.

Out on I-10 my Silverleaf was showing about 7.5 mpg doing 60 mph. But as soon as we got passed Katy and into Houston proper, the wind starts to be blocked by all the buildings and our mpg started to creep up. And by the time we got around to heading north on I-45 I was showing 8.7 mpg.

We pulled into the Lake Conroe Thousand Trails about 12:15, got a nice site in the ‘E’ ring, and got set up. Then my problems began.

I could not get my computer to connect to anything. Or well, it would connect. It just showed No Internet Access. Zip, Zero, Nada. No matter whether I was using a direct Ethernet connection to my Cradlepoint router, or connecting by Wi-Fi.

So my thought was a problem with the Cradlepoint. But then I found that my Galaxy Tab could connect just find. So next I hotspotted my Galaxy S5 phone and connected the computer to it via Wi-Fi. Still No Internet Access.

But again, the Tab connected to the phone just fine. So it was obviously the computer. But it worked fine before we left Colorado. But then I remembered.

I’ve learned to always shutdown the computer the night before we travel, because a number of times in the past, I’ve shut down right before we were ready to leave, and then saw –

Installing Update 1 of 55.
Do Not Turn Your Computer Off.

Crap!

So I shut the computer off the night before. Which I did last night. But when I shut down this morning, I got the Installing Update 1 of 1.

But it only took a couple of minutes, and it was done. So maybe this was the culprit. But until I could get online, I couldn’t find out what this morning’s update was for.

So next step was to invoke the connection troubleshooting functions built in to Windows. So that that point I started on another project.

The HD in our granddaughter Piper’s HP laptop had died (that seems to be going around a lot lately) and I was going to replace it with a new one, and then re-install Windows 7, which it had origianlly, and then upgrade it to Windows 10.

I can’t go directly to Win10 because I only have a product key for Win7. So I have to do that one first, and then I can do the ‘free’ upgrade to 10.

So after I got the laptop apart, the old drive out, the new one in, and was installing Win7 from the USB stick, I happened to look over at my computer monitor and it was showing a website.

So I guess either the troubleshooting routine found the problem and fixed it, or it fixed itself. Either way it was working.

Well, working except for the crappy Internet service in Conroe. It seems to get worse every time we come.

Back at Colorado River, with the recent XLTE upgrade, I was showing about 45 Mps on 4G and about 2.75 Mps on 3G. But here today, I’m showing only about 1.15 Mps on 4G. I’m afraid to look at 3G.

If I was even more paranoid than I actually am, I might think it’s a conspiracy to force us to use the park’s new FastWave Wi-Fi system for $3.95 a day, or $14.95 a week.

They wouldn’t be that sneaky, would they?

About 4:30 we drove over to Culver’s for Jan’s Mother’s Day dinner. It’s not that I’m not cheap, I am. But’s it’s what she wanted, and we avoided the crowds.

Then it was on to Wal-Mart for a few things, and Starbuck’s on the way home for a couple of Cinnamon Dolce Lattes.

Unfortunately, our new favorite Smoked Butterscotch flavor is no more.

“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” — Thomas Jefferson

asdfasdfasd