Web-dev

So I bought a 17 inch Zoostorm laptop from PCNextday . It got 5 stars out of 5 from Computer Shopper and it worked out about £200 cheaper the a 17″ Dell laptop.

All was well, I was aware that they did have a bad reputation for customer service, but I thought I would risk it as the saving was too much.

The laptop came within 3 days of me ordering it. This was a surprise as they said that it can take up to take 3 weeks.

The laptop was working well, I was impressed with the screen (even though computer shopper said it was dull). However I was having a problem with the built in wireless card (Atheros). It was getting a very low signal even though I was sitting next to the wireless router. I first thought this was my router, so I asked someone else to test it and they reported the same problems. I then went and upgraded the software to the latest driver. The windows drivers are difficult to find so here is a good resource . But this had no effect. So after tearing my hair out I could not figure it out I emailed the technical support at pcnextday. They took a long time to respond, but their response was worth the wait. They basically said to check weather the wireless card was installed correctly and gave me these pictures :

So I unscrewed the laptop and checked it. I found out that the card was in the correct place, however the antenna was connected to the wrong point in the card. So I changed that and tested it. Unfortunately this did not work. As there were two wires that were black, I thought maybe the person who installed it made a mistake and attached the wrong wire. So I added the other wire and it worked. Now I have an excellent signal :)

I hope this experience helps someone. I think pcnextday need to work on their quality control :)

I have installed Ubuntu 6.10 on the laptop. All of the things seem to work. I had to do some configuration to get the wireless card to work though, but that is another blog post.

Hamza