Wireless connected but no Internet

After yet another D-Link DSL modem died on me, and being tired of another D-Link creature's, the WiFi router, nasty habit of rebooting at random every hour or so, I've upgraded to a Diamond SupraMax-yada-yada-something modem, which also includes the wireless router and stuff.

I've connected the notebook without any problems, but the desktop behaved strangely: it connected in a snap, reported Excellent signal strength and sometimes I was able to browse the Internet, but mostly I could not. I was ready to go get another router model but noticed an interesting thing: even when I seemingly hadn't the Internet connection, Skype was staying green. I also remembered a note from the manual saying any firewall software on the system should be disabled.

With the dawn of understanding shining upon me, I've typed in the IP address of the web server at work and aha! there it was. Then I tried disabling ZoneAlarm and voila! - I can haz teh Internets! But being paranoid, I just couldn't let the extra curtain go, so I turned ZoneAlarm back on but instead added the DNS servers fetched from the router's admin panel right into the wireles connection's settings. That worked, too, without having to mess with ZoneAlarm's settings.

w00t!

Fixing firefox 2.0.0.8 slow/high CPU issue

After installing the new version it became incredibly slow on my XP system, CPU usage shot up to 50% (i.e. took all of one of the cores), I couldn't type without swearing. Reverting as far back as 0.5 didn't help, so it had to be the settings issue.

And here's what solved it for me:

- go to C:\Documents and Settings\<your user name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles and make a copy of your running profile, just in case (copy the whole folder that is called something like <letters-numbers>.default).

- now go into that folder and remove all 0-bytes-long files called prefs-1.js, prefs-2.js and so on, and then remove all the 0-bytes-long sessionstore-1.js, sessionstore-2.js, and so on. Make sure all files you're deleting have 0 length, so that nothing important gets deleted (and if it does, that's what was the backup for!)

I suppose the problem was in sessionstore files, as I had 9999 of them, probably preventing the poor thing from creating any more.

P.S. The best tool to mess with files like that is the Far Manager.