When in doubt, upgrade the firmware

I’ve had an old D-Link DI-614+ Wireless Broadband Router since 2003 or so. Its ticked along perfectly for the last five years, though since last week has started to show signs of wanting to go kaput. It had occasionally cut out on me in the past, but never so persistently.

Just before heading out the door to Best Buy to pick up a new one I figured I’d check D-Link to see if there were any firmware updates. Sure enough the last update was in 2006. Dowload to desktop, upload to router, reboot, and.. suddenly, no more problems. In fact, I seem to be getting better throughput than before. And the router’s clock now works. And signal strength is suddenly 100% everywhere in the house.

Sheesh, if I had thought to do this before I never would have wasted money on the Hawking Range Extender (which also required its own firmware upgrade).

So, fifty bucks saved and lesson learned. When in doubt, upgrade the firmware.

Hawking Range Extender and Vista

I’m pretty sure someone else will be searching for an answer to this so I figured I should post.

The Hawking Hi-Gain Wireless-G Range Extender (HWREG1) doesn’t work on Vista unless you upgrade the firmware to version 1.26 available here. (Mine was originally 1.21..)

Don’t bother trying to contact the apparently fictional “24/7 Customer Support”. Upgrading is actually pretty simple:

  1. Identify the IP address that the Range Extender is running on from the setup wizard. (Typically 192.168.0.235 if set manually or possibly .100 if set via DHCP.)
  2. Point your browser to that IP.
  3. Go to “Upgrade”.
  4. Upload the firmware .bin you grabbed from the Hawking site.

It took me a couple of tries to successfully upload the .bin and get the Range Extender to reboot itself. Since then, however, no problems on Vista.

By the way, the Range Extender is a signal repeater that extends the stength of your WiFi signal. I’m using one to pipe signal into the more remote nether regions of our home.