TP-Link TL-WA901ND v2 problems, now with added DD WRT

We purchased two of these devices for our offices a short while back, however, after setting one up on our private network and the other for external users, we discovered the one we used internally would drop out every now and again.

Sometimes, it would stop displaying the wireless SSID altogether, sometimes it would stop displaying it to new clients, yet clients that were already connected could still use the network, sometimes it would flat out deny any new connections to the network an IP. It would also display more than one of the problems at the same time. All could be resolved for around 12 hours by restarting the device.

We never had any more than 15 devices connected at any one time to our internal one, at 1 or 2 at most to the external one. I tried swapping the settings on them so we were now connecting to the other device instead for internal use, to no avail. Whichever one we connected the most clients to, would always drop out, despite running the latest firmware from TP Link.

How this issue hasn't been resolved yet I don't know.

(Image is copyright of DD-WRT)

Seeing as we rarely used the external device, I decided to have a play around with it so I flashed the custom firmware from DD WRT onto the spare access point.

To start with I wasn't able to access the GUI. To get into it, I connected to the wireless network 'dd-wrt' that it broadcasts,and within command prompt, had to set a neighbor on the wireless connection.

Open 'cmd' as admin.

Type: arp -a

Then: netsh -c "interface ipv4"

Then: set neighbots "Wireless Network Connection 1" "192.168.1.1" "A0:F3:C1:81:XX:XX"

You must replace the 'wireless network connection' with the name of your connection - check the network and sharing centre for this. Also check the bottom of your access point for the correct MAC address and replace the "A0:F3:..." etc with your one.

Then: exit

Then type 'arp -a' again to check if the MAC address is assigned to that particular IP.

If you can connect to 192.168.1.1 through your web browser, then your work is done! If not, you may need to restart the access point and as soon as the network is picked up by your computer, quickly connect and hit refresh on the webpage - you have to be quick to get in!!

To be able to properly setup the device on your network, you must fill in all the correct values, otherwise you may not be able to connect again.

Setup - Basic Setup:

WAN Connection Type - Disabled

Network Setup - Router IP - all of your network information goes in here, your local IP address is the one you want to connect to your access point on (remember this so you can connect back to the interface in the future!!), subnet mask should be taken from your main router and is normally 255.255.255.0, gateway is the IP address of your main router and if you have a local DNS server, enter it in the box as well.

Tick the 'Assign WAN Port to Switch'

Enable your DHCP server for the AP and input your correct network details

Setup - MAC Address Clone
Make sure this is disabled

Setup - Advanced Router:

Make sure Operating Mode is set to your preferred type, we have ours as a Gateway

Wireless - Basic Settings:

Enter all of your setings in here, wireless mode is AP for us, the channel/bandwidth settings and your preferred broadcast SSID.

Wireless - Wireless Security:

Ensure you enter a password in here, otherwise you will have an open network that anyone can join. We use WPA2 Personal Mixed with AES algorithms.

Great Discounts With CDKeyNexus

Hi guys, I've been in touch with the guys over at CDKeyNexus.com and have agreed a coupon discount code for all readers.

It will work with all purchases and give you 5% off their already fantastic prices for games!

It's quite simple, all you need to do is type this coupon discount code into their checkout:

Digital

They will email you the game serial key after you make your purchase to add to the relevant platform, Origin, Steam, Uplay and so on! Fear not if the purchase is not in your currency, especially if you use PayPal, it will convert it at a decent rate for you!

They've got some great prices on the new SimCity, Tomb Raider, Heart of the Swarm and Crysis 3 games and are always more than happy to answer any questions you have for them!

Samsung Galaxy S4: Information Imminent!

Samsung has been fairly good at keeping quiet on this one, however rumour has it that there will be an announcement on March 14th 2013 to showcase their new flagship mobile phone handset - the Galaxy S4 (S IV).

At the moment there is too much information to speculate on, however I'm certain we will see the now-standard 'upgrades' when manufacturers push their new flagships out, such as a higher res camera, higher ppi (pixel density) plus possibly larger screen and a much smoother and more enjoyable user experience in the form of a faster processor.

The Galaxy S3 base specs are as follows: Display: Super AMOLED Screen - 720 x 1280 pixels (4.8inch) at 306ppi, CPU: 1.4GHz Quad Core Cortex A9, Camera: 8MP

If we take the above and extrapolate along with taking some of the circulating rumours in, we could expect the S4 to come with a 1080p 5inch 441ppi display while sporting an Octa Core Exynos chip (with split cores) but also potential for a Snapdragon. The highest bets are currently on the 5440 Exynos Quad Core though, as it has been floating around for a few months now and is much faster than the previous chip. It seems it is all up in the air at the moment due to potential manufacturing issues. We've also heard that samsung have worked on getting the physical size of their flash memory down to enable them to produce thinner phones, this may be something we end up seeing in the new S4. The S3 sported an 8MP camera however we've heard there may be a 10MP on the upcoming S4, that's quite something for a mobile handset!

X79-UD5 IRST TRIM with RAID0 SSDs in Windows 7

Hi all, just a quick update, to cut a long story short - I developed a problem on booting up since I swapped some drives around.

I swapped the 1TB out and in place put in a 500GB WD drive, setup a RAID0 with the two other 500GB drives and put the 1TB in my new server/HTPC (update to come on this) for remote backup from my main setup.

The problem was my boot times rocketed from around 15 seconds to 1 minute 20 seconds at points. It was a little frustrating especially as I'm running the two RAID0 256GB M4 SSDs. Eventually after a day of working on/reinstalling the OS/swapping drives about, I discovered it was the Marvell drivers having a paddy as, to create the RAID, I'd moved my optical drive onto the Marvell controller. On boot it was hanging for 60s just trying to initialise the DVD drive. Had to create custom event views for it to try and track it all down.

In the process, however, I discovered that on the X79-UD5's new BIOS, there is an option to switch around the Intel Controller's mode. I was presented with two options, either RSTe, or IRST. Now we all know that the new 7 series chipsets support RAID TRIM, however X79 is on the 6 series and was not supported.

Knowing that previously I'd been using RSTe (enterprise version) drivers, I had a dig around and found that if I switched the OROM (option rom) to IRST, I could install the standard version of Intel Rapid Storage Technology. I'm currently running version 11.6.0.1030, which, after a little checking, is now issuing and executing TRIM commands on the RAID0 M4s!

So - hopefully the rest of the motherboard manufacturers will, at some point, be issuing updates to allow this OROM to be switchable, especially as us enthusiasts on X79 won't like to be left out of such luxuries as TRIM, especially considering we are more likely than others to be running RAID SSDs!

Far Cry 3 Driver Crash/Black Screen

Hi all, another quick fix post here.

Some people have been reporting some Far Cry 3 crashes lately.

A few fixes if you've been having this issue are listed below:

First off the basic ones - drop your GPU and CPU back to stock clocks, if you have overclocked them. Just to rule this out.

Secondly make sure you are using your latest GPU driver, sometimes the beta drivers can throw some screwy things into the mix.

Try running the game in DirectX 9.0 mode (you can find this setting in the game options), this can be a popular solution to some of the nVidia issues.

Some have found that creating a short cut to the far cry executable (find it in the far cry directory - wherever you have saved it to) and adding -offline into the 'target' section can help. For instance: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Ubisoft\FarCry 3\bin\farcry3.exe" -offline 

If you use a program like MSI Afterburner, set your power to something like 80 or 90%, not the full 100%, this in a way is almost downclocking your card, but it can help in newer models.

If any of these fixes solve your problem post up! If they don't, let me know as well, even more so if you find a solution so I can add it on the end!

Thanks

GTX 680 4GB SLI Benchmarks

I've had the opportunity of testing a pair of Palit Jetstream GTX 680 4GB cards in SLI and thought I should share some of the benchmarks and screenshots with you all.

The setup is as follows:

i7 3930K @ 4.2Ghz Cooled by Corsair H100 in Push/Pull
Gigabyte X79-UD5
2 x Crucial M4 256GB in RAID0
2x Palit Jetstream GTX 680 4GB
3x iiyama Prolite 24" E2473HDS screens giving a resolution of 5760*1080

These aren't perfect benchmarks, they were all run for varying amounts of time but in that time I tried to simulate what would be the highest and lowest FPS situations.



BF3 - Operation Guillotine (Max graphics)

Frames	Time (ms)	Min	Max	Avg
2464	49412	36	62	49.866

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (Flight Around Stormwind) [I am running max graphics with about 5 custom settings which advance them beyond what is controllable in the UI]

Frames	Time (ms)	Min	Max	Avg
11028	124856	47	214	88.326

Dear Esther

Frames	Time (ms)	Min	Max	Avg
7574	56207	110	204	134.752

Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (With texture packs up to 2.8GB and ENB series, Vsynced at 60fps hence max)

Frames	Time (ms)	Min	Max	Avg
8292	141952	50	59	58.414

Guild Wars 2

Frames	Time (ms)	Min	Max	Avg
3645	79888	32	64	45.626

There are certain games in which it would be silly to benchmark, for example DotA 2/LoL don't run well without Vsync, so with this setup they quite happily sit at 60fps, CS:GO will run anywhere between 140 and 290fps across all three screens. Tera will run at a fairly constant 60fps as well, maybe dropping to 55 occasionally.

DotA 2 Black Screen Fix

Just a quick note here really, if you're having issues with DotA 2 playing properly with your graphics card setup and just get a black screen when loading (and then sometimes following by a really jittery DotA background music), you should try this:

Right click on your DotA 2 in Steam, go to Properties and Set Launch Options, then enter the following:

-windowed -w 1920 -h 1080 -noborder -novid

Replace the 1920 and 1080 with your actual resolutions.

This will launch the game windowed and maximised without the Valve intro video.

UPDATE: Also try removing your DotA2 config files located in steam/steamapps/common/dota 2 beta/dota/cfg and then in the launch options described above, add +autoconfig


EDIT: If you are still experiencing issues after applying this fix, a good precautionary measure is to update to your latest video card drivers, but to also do a full uninstall of the old ones too, a good program to use to completely clear them is Driver Sweeper.

As in the comments - you have to replace the numbers with the correct resolution of your screen, mine won't always be the same.