How to Boost Your Wireless Signal

In general, speed and range issues all can be lumped together as performance issues. You want both your speed and range to be as robust as possible. There are several factors that can impact both aspects of performance.

Distance can certainly impede performance. You may have a room in your home or office that is simply too far from your wireless router. Even the way your home or office is structured could be a culprit in poor wireless performance. If the signals have to bounce around too many corners to reach your wireless devices, that can cause problems (although a technology in newer, premium routers called beamforming, can help direct a routers signal to wireless clients).

Interference with the signal can be big factor in performance, too. If you live in an apartment building, your home might be inundated with signals from everyone elses routers. Maybe structural interference is the culprit. If your furnace, washing machine, and dryer are all between your router and your laptop, that doesnt help.

Maybe its the software youre using. Routers need software updates just like everything else - and sometimes the firmware they initially ship with is improved with a later-released update.

These are just a few of the possible reasons your connection might be poor (or nonexistent). Fortunately, there are many ways to extend your wireless signal, and most of them simply involve a bit of tweaking to your wireless network or adding some affordable components. Well walk you through ten of the most useful fixes for your connectivity woes.

Read the next 10 tips to extend your Wi-Fi signal. Some of the suggestions require no additional hardware or software to purchase, while others may require a small or larger investment, depending on the particular performance problem youre experiencing.

1. Change the channel

Wi-Fi routers operate on specific channels. When you set up a typical router, it usually chooses a certain channel by default. Some routers choose the least-crowded channel, but yours may not have. Check for yourself which Wi-Fi channel is the least crowded to boost the routers performance, perhaps boosting signal range. A good, free tool to use is inSSIDer. Dont be put off by the graphs and excess information. What you want to focus on is the column "Channel." See how many routers in this area are on channel 6 in the slide above? If your router is on the same channel, you want to switch it to a less-crowded one, like 4 or 1. You can change the channel of your router by going into its interface. All routers have different ways to access the interface, so check with your manufacturer.

2. Update router firmware

Updating router firmware is often overlooked by home users. Business networking devices usually display some sort of notification when newer software for the device is available for download. Consumer products such as home wireless routers, especially older routers, dont always offer this notification. Check often for firmware updates for your router. There is typically a section in the routers interface for upgrading the firmware. However, you often have to go the router manufacturers website and search for the firmware (most vendor make searching for firmware pretty easy) and then upload it through the routers interface. Theres often accompanying release notes that tell you what the firmware helps to fix; often the fixes are for connectivity problems.

3. Update adapter firmware

Just like routers, network adapters on PCs and laptops also are subject to firmware updates. Remember, good wireless range and performance is dictated not just by the router but by the network adapter on clients (as well as other factors, but these are the two biggies.) Most laptops have on-board adapters. Go into your Network settings to find the name of the adapter (via Control Panel in Windows OS) and then to that adapters manufacturers site to make sure you have the latest firmware.

4. Change position

Do you have your wireless router nestled up against your broadband modem tucked away in your entertainment center in your basement thats converted into the family den? Move it, if you have range issues. You dont have to have the router in close proximity to your modem. Ideally, a Wi-Fi router should be in a central location. You can purchase custom length Ethernet Cat 5 cable from Best Buy or any place that services computers (although if you do that, this is technically no longer a free options) if you need more flexibility in centrally positioning the router.

5. DD-WRT

For the adventurous; DD-WRT is open-source software for routers. Its known to ramp up router performance and extend the feature set beyond what typically comes with most routers. Not every router supports it, but the number of routers that are supported keeps growing. Warning; installing DD-WRT may quite possibly invalidate your routers warranty. Many manufacturers will not help you troubleshoot router issues once you have DD-WRT on them. Hence, this is not a recommended option for routers under warranty or in a business network. There are also no guarantees that DD-WRT upgrades wont negatively affect a router. However, many users are finding it a free way to trick-out their routers. So, if you have an older, spare router laying around, or want to take the plunge to see if DD-WRT firmware helps your range issues on a newer router, check if its supported on the DD-WRT site. Also note, its not easy to remove DD-WRT from some routers without doing a lot research.

6. Set up a second router as an access point or repeater

You can set up just about any router as a wireless access point. To do so, you need to connect the second routers LAN port to the primary routers LAN port. On the second router, you will want to give it the same addressing information as the primary router. For example, if you primary routers IP address is 192.168.2.1 and its netmask is 255.255.255.0; then you could make the second routers IP 192.168.2.2 and use the same netmask. Its also important that you assign the same SSID and security on the second router and turn DHCP off on the second one as well.

Newer routers make this process easier. If you have a second router thats only about a year old, most of them can be set to operate in "access point" or repeater mode. Configuring is as simple as clicking a button. Check with your routers manufacturer or documentation. You can also just purchase a dedicated access point such as Linksys By Ciscos Wireless-N Access Point with Dual Band WAP610N. This is a more expensive option, but will likely save you some network configuration headaches. Best bet, if you go this route; use an access point from the same manufacturer of your router.

7. Antennas

Newer 802.11n Wi-Fi routers are increasingly coming with internal antennas. There are some that still have or support external ones, and these antennas can often be upgraded. Consider a hi-gain antenna, which you can position so that the Wi-Fi signal goes in the direction you want. Hawking Technology offers the HAI15SC Hi-Gain Wireless Corner Antenna. Though, we have yet to test it; Hawking claims it boosts wireless signal strength from a standard 2dBi to 15dBi. Antennas like these can attach to most routers that have external antennas connectors. Hi-gain or "booster" antennas range in pricing from $40 to $100 dollars.

8. Repeaters/Extenders

Most major wireless networking vendors offer devices that act as repeaters or wireless extenders. While they can extend a Wi-Fi signal, they can be tricky to setup, can cause interference with the signal and can be expensive. A good repeater or extender can you set you back almost $200.

9. New Router/Adapters

How about getting new routers and adapters, altogether? Upgrading your home network to 802.11n and using the 5 GHz band should give noticeable performance improvement. 2.4 GHz is said to actually have greater range than the 5 GHz band, but that only becomes apparent when supplying wireless coverage to large areas such as college campuses or municipalities. In a number of our router testing, for smaller areas, like in a typical home network, 802.11n and the 5 Ghz band kept better throughout than 2.4 GHz with most routers, at greater distances. Its a more expensive option, but if wireless connectivity is crucial for you, its a plausible one. If you go with an 802.11n router, you will of course, need to update client adapters that support "N" as well. USB-based 802.11 N adapters are convenient ways to update a laptop that may have an older on-board adapter.

10. Single Vendor Solution

Vendors are quick to say that their product will work with other vendors products. But it just makes sense: Cisco network adapters will work better with Cisco routers; Belkin adapters work optimally with Belkin routers and etc. If possible, try to limit your network devices to one vendor; that means not only your router or adapter, but antennas, repeaters and access points.

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Reclaim your online privacy Thinking you’re being watched is no longer a simple case of you being paranoid

The documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden illustrated the startling reach of the world’s largest intelligence agencies. We learned that the agencies collaborated with technology companies to make it easier to spy on the public.

It’s no longer safe to assume anything about the security of your data – except that you’re not the only one who has access to it. Whether or not you’re on their radar, your activity may be indiscriminately sucked up by intelligence services, who have made it their right to know what you know.

One consequence is that average users are increasingly turning to open-source privacy tools. Much more transparent and often independently audited, they can’t be subverted as easily as a proprietary tool, making them the best means of retaining privacy in your online activities.

Encryption

We know the NSA and GCHQ have collaborated with technology companies to install backdoors into security products, so it’s reasonably safe to assume proprietary encryption solutions are compromised.

That means no more BitLocker, even though it’s highly convenient as it comes with some versions of Windows. Instead, we recommend you use the open-source TrueCrypt to encrypt your data.

It’s a powerful tool, offering volume-, partition- and drive encryption, plus the ability to set up hidden volumes or an entire OS. If you’re compelled to reveal your main encryption password for whatever reason, a hidden volume will remain safely encrypted and undetectable inside the visible volume. Think of it as a saferoom within a saferoom.

Download TrueCrypt from truecrypt.org and install it on your PC. To set up an encrypted area in which to store your most important files, first launch TrueCrypt, then click Create Volume and choose ‘Create an encrypted file container’.

You’ll be offered the option of making a hidden volume, but these must be created inside an existing volume, so choose Standard.

Click Select File and choose a location and a file name for your TrueCrypt container (don’t use an existing file name or it will be overwritten by the container). Choose your encryption and hash algorithm – novices can safely stick to the defaults – then choose the size of your container and a strong password. When prompted, randomly move your mouse around the TrueCrypt window for at least 30 seconds – the longer you move, the stronger the encryption.

To access your container, open TrueCrypt, choose any spare drive letter, select your container file from the Volume drop-down menu, then click Mount. Enter your password and the volume will appear in Windows Explorer. Drag a file on to this and it will be automatically encrypted and added to the container; open an encrypted file and it will temporarily be decrypted in your PC’s RAM. When you’re done with your container, just click Dismount and it will disappear.

There’s lots more you can do from there. You could create a hidden volume inside your standard volume, and you can encrypt a partition or OS using similar steps to creating a container. It’s all well documented both in the software and on the TrueCrypt website.

Web browsing

Tor is a free and open virtual network that bounces communications around the world to prevent sites from learning your physical location. It forms the basis of a range of security applications, the most common of which is the increasingly popular Tor browser. It’s based on a modified Firefox release, and if you follow some simple precautions it will grant you a level of anonymity online.

To set it up, go to torproject.org and download the Tor Browser Bundle. Run the downloaded file, choose an extraction location, then open the folder and click ‘Start Tor Browser’. The Vidalia Control Panel will automatically handle the randomised network setup and, when Tor is ready, the browser will open; close it to disconnect from the network.

It won’t be browsing as usual, as the Tor browser is necessarily stripped of many of Firefox’s modern trimmings. Plug-ins, such as Flash and QuickTime, are by default blocked as they can reveal your non-Tor IP address, as can opening any downloaded document that’s handled by an external application such as Word. The makers strongly advise against using BitTorrent over Tor, too.

Don’t go switching to Chrome, though: Tor is not protecting your PC’s internet traffic, only the traffic that goes via the Tor Browser, so it’s no good just having Tor running in the background.

Because of these restrictions, not to mention the reduced speed of browsing as data flies around the world en route to your PC, it’s not practical to use Tor for everything online. It’s fine to keep using your current browser for everyday online activities – if you want things a bit more private, search with DuckDuckGo.com rather than Google – but try to at least get into the habit of switching to Tor when it’s time to do your banking, shopping or any other sensitive tasks.

Messaging

Public key cryptography is no longer only for IT experts, as more and more people are using tools such as OpenPGP to keep their communications private.

In very simple terms, with PGP you generate two unique keys. Your public key is what you give to others, and they can use it to encrypt any messages meant for your attention. Your private key is what you keep secret and safe, as it works in conjunction with your public key to unlock those messages when they arrive. The public key alone can never decrypt a message, which means you’re safe to hand it out even to people you’ve never met.

The most popular implementation of OpenPGP is the free GnuPG (gnupg.org). Unless you’re skilled with the command line, scroll down to the Binaries section on the Downloads page to find the special setup files for each OS. Note that both sender and recipient need the software installed.

For Windows that’s Gpg4win, a suite that contains GnuPG plus a few other useful tools and extensions, as well as a PDF of the excellent ‘Gpg4win Compendium’. The ‘For Novices’ chapter is a great place to start learning about PGP.

Gpg4win includes everything you need: there are plug-ins for Outlook 2003 and 2007, and a standalone email client called Claws Mail that works with the keys you generate in Kleopatra.

To generate your own pair of keys, run Kleopatra (it’s installed with Gpg4win), then click File, New Certificate. Choose the first option that pops up, enter your name and email address, then click Create Key. Your chosen passphrase is important, as it determines the strength of your encryption; try to use a phrase at least four- or five-words long, but be sure you’ll remember it. Back up your newly created key pair, then Export the certificate to your PC. Opening that file will give you your public key in text form.

That’s the very basic setup, but there’s an awful lot more to it. The Gpg4win Compendium document has walkthroughs for everything, so the best thing you can do is work through the examples until you’re confident enough to start using OpenPGP with your friends, relatives and colleagues.

One area of messaging that Gpg4win doesn’t cover is instant messaging. Skype uses industry-standard encryption to keep private your conversations. However, if you don’t want to put your trust in a mainstream app, you might like to try Off-the-record (otr.cypherpunks.ca). This encryption toolkit works with the Pidgin IM client (pidgin.im).

Disk cleaning

The final tool in your privacy arsenal is a vital one: a good disk cleaner. BleachBit is a simple piece of software that can shred files to prevent recovery, and overwrite free disk space to hide traces of old files. It also automatically hunts down and deletes unnecessary files on your hard disk, from caches and cookies to the temporary folders of thousands of applications.

Head to bleachbit.sourceforge.net to download and install the software. The interface will show you any supported applications installed on your PC on the left, along with information on what will be deleted for each on the right. Just tick what you want to clean, leave anything you’re unsure of, and click Preview to see how much room you’ll free up. Then tap Clean.

The extra privacy tools are all in the File menu. Shred Files and Shred Folders will delete and overwrite your selected data. Wipe Free Space will go through a drive or partition and overwrite files previously deleted by any software, so they can’t be easily recovered. After doing this, BleachBit will also attempt to wipe metadata about those files by filling Windows’ Master File Table.

Tails

If you want a bit of everything we’ve covered in one package, try Tails. It’s a live Debian-based OS that you can run on any PC from a DVD or USB drive. As it uses only the host system’s RAM, it leaves no trace when you switch off and disconnect. You can rock up at an internet café or use the PC in your hotel lobby without worrying about viruses and spyware on the host OS, and you can also use Tails to circumvent regional locks and censorship. Bear in mind, though, that you must boot it from a disc or external drive.

Download the Tails ISO image from tails.boum.org and follow the instructions to verify the image. To install it on a USB drive, first go to pendrivelinux.com to download and run the Universal USB Installer. Choose Tails from its drop-down list and click Browse to select your downloaded ISO image, then select the drive letter of your USB stick. Finally, click Create to build a bootable Tails OS drive.

Tails includes a range of tools, all of which are preconfigured to connect to the internet through the Tor network – it blocks any attempts by applications to directly access the internet.

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Here’s How Overclock Your Graphics Board

Stepping your graphics cards GPU beyond its specified clock speed will improve its performance and may stave off an expensive upgrade. Well show you how to do it safely.

MANY PC GAMERS eagerly await the release of next generation graphics boards, hoping that the new hardware will boost frame rates and make the latest games look better. But while such upgrades usually do increase game performance, improve image quality, or both, high end boards are expensive and may not be necessary.

Today, even midrange graphics cards are generally fast enough to pump out buttery smooth frame rates in cutting edge games at all but the highest resolutions. If your current graphics card is serving you well, and you just want a little something extra to pep up performance, overclocking may be the better way to go. It will certainly be more affordable.

Why Overclock?

In its early days, overclocking may have been a black art reserved for hard core computer geeks, but today its about as easy as can be, and its usually safe too. Yes, overclocking a component can shorten its life span. But if you dont push things too far. and if you keep temperatures under control, you have little reason to worry.

One key is to ensure that your PC has an adequate cooling system and a power supply that can handle an overclocked board. Modern graphics boards have thermally controlled fans that spin faster to dissipate heat from an overclocked board. The card may be a bit noisy as a result, but if the overclock remains stable and the graphics cards cooler keeps up, you should be good to go.

Both AMD and Nvidia (thebig two graphics board makers) have built overclocking tools into their drivers. AMDs are readily available (on supported boards) in the AMD Overdrive tab. listed in the companys Catalyst Control Center software suite (in the Performance section). Nvidias overclocking tools aren’t exposed by default in its GeForce drivers, but installing its System Tools utility will make them available. Simply pick up and install the Systems Tools utility from Nvidia.com; frequency controls will then be visible in the performance and tuning section of the GeForce driver.

Disregarding software/driver optimizations, game engine tweaks, and system interface speeds, the performance of a graphics board is typically determined in part by the computing speed and fill rate of its graphics processing unit (GPU), and in part by the amount of memory bandwidth its frame buffer memory affords. (The amount of frame buffer memory on the card can also come into play as resolutions and texture sizes increase, but we don’t have space here to discuss those factors in depth.) By increasing the frequencies of the GPU and the frame buffer memory on your graphics board, you can make them process and move more data, more quickly, increasing overall performance.

How to Overclock

Overclocking a graphics board is a fairly straightforward process. All you need is a working and properly configured graphics board, and a few of your favorite games or a benchmark like Futuremark 3DMark 11 to test stability. For the purposes of this article, we used a brand-new AMD Radeon HD 7950 installed in a high end. Intel powered test gaming system running Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit).

AMD RADEON HD 7950 card improved its frame rate on Lost Planet 2 by 20.48 percent after overclocking.

Before you begin overclocking, install the latest drivers for your graphics board (and Nvidias System Tools if necessary), and play a few games to ensure that the system is stable. If all is working well, restart the system, open the graphics boards control panel, and navigate to the overclocking or frequency control section; we used the Overdrive tab built into AMD’s drivers.

First, enable Overdrive by ticking the necessary box, and max out the power control settings to eliminate any power related frequency restrictions. Next, increase the GPU frequency by moving the appropriate slider by a few megahertz at a time, and apply the settings. Then play a game or loop a benchmark to test stability.

For example, our Radeon HD 7950*s GPU was clocked at 800MHz by default. We started by moving the GPU clock settings slider in increments of 10MHz, until our test system became unstable. As soon as we encountered any visual anomalies, or a game or the system crashed, we turned the GPU frequency back down by 10MHz and tested for stability again. Ultimately we settled on a stable GPU frequency of 1000MHz — a  200MHz increase over stock.

Once we had determined our peak GPU frequency by using the method just described, we set it back to its default clock speed and then focused on the graphics cards memory. By default, the Radeon HD 7950’s memory is clocked at 1250MHz. We used the same procedure of increasing the memory frequency by 10MHz increments, and testing the boards stability at each step of the way. In the end we achieved a stable memory frequency of 1500MHz.

We recommend overclocking the GPU and the memory separately to isolate any instability that the tweaking may introduce to that particular component. Once you know the peak frequency for both, set the GPU and memory to those speeds simultaneously and test for stability once more. If all is well, youre done. If not. lower the frequencies a bit more, and retest the graphics card. Some graphics boards may remain stable while overclocked, but offer lower performance when running at higher frequencies due to thermal or power throttling. If your system behaves that way, reduce the GPU and memory frequencies until performance begins to scale properly.

The Results

To see how overclocking affects a Radeon HD 7950’s performance, we ran a handful of benchmarks on our board while it was configured in different ways. First, we ran a set of benchmarks on the board while it was in its stock configuration. Then, we overclocked the GPU from 800MHz to 1000MHz and ran a second set of numbers. Next, we overclocked only the card’s memory, from 1250MHz to 1500MHz. and ran another set of tests. And finally, we retested the board with both its GPU and memory overclocked in concert.

Overclocking the GPU and memory together yielded performance gains much larger than the sum of the two overclocks taken separately: Performance rose by at least 20 percent.

We performed all of the benchmark tests at a resolution of 1920 by 1200. with 4X MSAA enabled and all ingame graphical options set to their maximum values. We chose those relatively taxing settings to ensure that the graphics board — and not another component, such as the CPU or RAM — was the performance bottleneck in our test system.

As the chart above shows, with the Radeon HD 7950, overclocking the GPU had more impact on performance than overclocking the memory did. In the applications we ran. boosting the GPU frequency by 25 percent led to performance increases of 6.96 percent to 8.95 percent. Increasing the memory frequency by 20 percent also yielded better performance, but the improvements fell in a more modest range of 1.39 percent to 3.91 percent.

Memory bandwidth hungry graphics boards would benefit more than the Radeon HD 7950 did from memory overclocking. A stock Radeon HD 7950 offers upward of 240 gbps of memory bandwidth - much more than most lower end boards can supply — so adding a few gigabytes per second didn’t help much. Still, overclocking the GPU and memory together yielded performance gains much larger than the sum of the two overclocks taken separately: With both GPU and memory overclocked, the Radeon HD 7950s performance rose by at least 20 percent across our tests.

The proportionally larger performance increases that result from overclocking the graphics processor and memory concurrently are the result of the GPUs being more fully utilized. Increasing memory bandwidth while overclocking the GPU allows data to pass to and from the GPU more quickly, yielding better resource utilization.

Going the Extra Mile

You can gain plenty of extra performance by moving a few sliders in your graphics cards driver control panels, but a third-party utility such as MSIs Afterburner lets you take overclocking further by introducing voltage tweaks into the equation. Unless you perform cooling modifications, however. we advise against altering your graphics boards voltages. Increasing the voltages may allow for even higher overclocking, but doing so will also drive up heat output and power consumption significantly, over and above the increases that are due to higher frequencies alone.

How Much Does Overclocking Help Performance?

Game

Stock Radeon HD 7950

GPU overclocked to 1000MHz

Memory overclocked to 1500MHz

GPU & memory overclocked

Performance

Improvment over stock

Performance

Improvment over stock

Performance

Improvment over stock

Alien vs. Predator (frame rate)

46 fps

49.2 fps

6.96%

47.8 fps

3.91%

55.2 fps

20%

Far Cry 2 (frame rate)

103.82 fps

112.62 fps

8.37%

106.26 fps

2.25%

124.83 fps

20.17%

Lost Planet 2 (frame rate)

50.3 fps

54.8 fps

835%

51 fps

1.38%

60.6 fps

20.48%

Unigine Heaven 2.5

(frame rate)

35.3 fps

38.4 fps

8.78%

36.1 fps

2.27%

42.5 fps

20.4%

(benchmark score)

890

967

8.65%

910

2.25%

1071

20.34%

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Protect Your Equipment

Power fluctuations, surges, and failures are common occurrences. If your ofice isn’t prepared for them, your equipment and (perhaps more importantly) your data are on borrowed time. Use this article get familiar with the equipment that can protect your devices and computers—as well as the equipment that can’t.

Power Strips

In the power protection world, power strips are the bottom tier. Most typically feature a built-in circuit breaker that helps to prevent power overloads; this offers some limited protection against energy surges caused by lightning strikes and surges of power. As such, power strips are affordable and ideal for powering devices that aren’t critical to your productivity, such as lights, fans, and radios. A power strip is also handy for powering a series of devices that you want to shut off when you leave a room, because you’ll be able to simply lip one switch and kill the power to all the connected devices.

Surge Protectors

Also known as surge suppressors, these power protectors resemble power strips. The primary difference is that a surge protector can detect when power goes beyond what is considered to be an acceptable level. Excess power is routed to a grounding wire and fuse that will burn out if the electricity exceeds the level it can withstand. In addition to power outlets, many surge protectors also include protection ports for your phone, cable TV, and wired Internet lines.

Protection against extra electricity makes a surge protector perfect for connecting your vital devices, including monitors, printers, smartphones, and home theater equipment. Surge protectors feature a joule rating, which is how much energy the surge protector is capable of absorbing before failure. The higher the joule rating, the more electricity the surge protector can withstand.

UPS

Short for uninterruptible power supply, a UPS has an internal battery that keeps your electronics temporarily operational, even when there’s no power. Typically, the battery will provide enough juice for components to run for a few minutes, giving you time to properly shut the devices down. A UPS is an excellent addition for ofice computers, servers, and other equipment where data would be lost or hardware could be injured if unexpectedly turned off.

Another benefit of a UPS is that connected electronics won’t be damaged during power lickers, brownouts, and other short-term outages. Most UPSes also provide a few extra surge protection outlets (these normally don’t provide backup battery power), so you can connect PC peripherals and accessories that won’t need to be protected from surprise shutdowns. In addition to providing backup battery power, most UPSes can protect connected devices from electrical surges.

This Tripp Lite surge protector features 
eight outlets and can handle 3240 Joules of energy.

The Tripp Lite ECO750UPS gives you an extra 45 minutes of energy during a power failure.

This 6-inch power strip from Staples features a 15-amp reset circuit breaker for basic device protection.

Travel Adapters

International travelers must also consider how their electronics will work when they travel abroad, because other countries have different outlets than the United States. You’ll need to invest in outlet adapters that are designed to operate in the countries where you’ll be traveling. Most travel adapter kits provide you with several different types of outlet adapters and a guide that indicates where each plug should be used.

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