How to Get Better Wireless Signal

Like all sufficiently advanced technologies, Wi-Fi can feel like magic. But Wi-Fi isn’t magic – its radio waves. A variety of things can interfere with these radio waves, making your wireless connection weaker and more unreliable.

The main keys to improving your wireless network’s signal are positioning your router properly — taking obstructions into account — and reducing interference from other wireless networks and household appliances.

Wireless Router Positioning

Your wireless router’s positioning can greatly affect your coverage area and the strength of your signal. Follow these quick tips to position your router for the best signal.

• Place the router in the middle of your house. If you place the router in a room off to the side of your house, you won’t get as strong a signal on the other side of your house.
• Position the router’s antenna vertically, so that the antenna is standing straight up. Many antennas can be adjusted and lie horizontally, but standing straight up is generally the ideal position.
• Elevate your router away from floors. You’ll get better reception if the router is on a desk, not on the floor.

You should also pay attention to the kinds of materials the router is near. For example, placing the router on a metal desk or up against a metal wall will cause problems. Signals can travel through a wood desk easily, but metal will obstruct the signals.

Other types of obstructions can also cause problems. For example, if there’s a metal filing cabinet between your computer and the router, you may not receive a wireless signal. The same applies to other types of dense objects.

Interference From Other Wireless Networks

Interference from other wireless networks in the area can cause issues with your wireless signal. To determine whether interference is occurring, you can use an app like Wi-FiAnalyzer for Android. It will show you the wireless channels nearby networks are using and recommend the ideal network for you to use — one that isn’t being used by as many networks. This app will also allow you to walk around the area and see where you get the best signal and where the signal is weakest – you can do this with any other device, too.

If multiple wireless networks are competing for the same channel, this can cause problems. To fix this, you can change the wireless channel in your router’s web interface. You can do this even if you don’t have access to a wireless-analyzing app – change the signal to a different channel and then see if your wireless connection improves.

Interference From Household Appliances

A variety of household appliances can cause wireless interference, including cordless phones, baby monitors, and microwave ovens. Depending on the positioning of your wireless router, your networked device, and the appliance, you may even have the wireless network cut out when the microwave or cordless phone is in use.

Problems with cordless phones can be solved by replacing your phones with phones that operate on a different frequency, such as 900 MHz or 1.9 GHz. Cordless phones using the 2.4 Ghz frequency will interfere with wireless networks.

Problems with microwaves can often by solved by positioning the your devices such that the microwave isn’t between your router and the device. it’s also possible that a new microwave will help, if the new microwave has better shielding.

Other devices can also cause problems. For example, older Bluetooth devices can interfere with nearby Wi-Fi signals, although newer Bluetooth devices don’t.

Repeaters, Antennas, and Reflectors

If you need to cover a large area with a wireless signal and your router just isn’t cutting it, you can buy a wireless repeater or range extender. These devices repeat the wireless signal, extending its area. You don’t even need special devices for this – if you have some old routers around, you can use multiple routers to extend your Wi-Fi network.

Depending on your router, you may be able to attach an improved antenna that gives your signal additional range. You can also try building a Wi-Fi reflector that reflects the signal in a specific direction.

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Speed Up Your Internet with Google Public DNS

Are you looking for a faster way to browse the Internet and have pages load faster? If so, you might be interested in trying out Google Public DNS, here we will take a look at adding it to your router or home computer.

DNS (Domain Name System) translates an IP address to an easy to remember hostname. If you use your ISPs DNS settings by default, it may not be the fastest way to get to your favourite sites. We have previously recommended the service OpenDNS as speeds are usually faster than your ISP and it offers several other cool options. Google has recently launched a free public DNS service, and we’ll take a look at setting it up on your PC or router.

Add Google DNS to a Window Computer

To add Google Public DNS to your Windows 7 machine, right-click on Network and choose Properties.

Alternatively, you can enter Network and Sharing Center into the search box in the Start Menu.

The Network and Sharing Center opens and you’ll want to click on Change adapter settings which is located on the right side of the screen.

Now right-click on Local Area Connection and select Properties. If you have a wireless connection, right-click on Wireless Network Connection and click Properties.

The Local Area Connection Properties screen opens and you’ll want to highlight Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) then click the Properties button.

The Internet Protocol Version 4 Properties window comes up. If you already have DNS settings listed, make sure to copy or write them down in case you want to switch back. Select Use the following DNS server addresses and type in the following for Preferred and Alternate DNS server:

Note: According to Google you can interchange the Primary and secondary address, but don’t use the same number for both.

Preferred DNS Server: 8.8.8.8

Alternate DNS Server: 8.8.4.4

Click Ok and then close out of the remaining windows and reboot your system, then you’ll want to test out the settings. Basically browse around to your bookmarked sites and make sure they display properly.

Add Google DNS to Your Router

In this example we are using a Belkin Wireless Router. Each router varies but the principle is the same. Go into your router configuration settings by typing the Router IP into your browser. Mostly in Home Router it will 192.168.1.1..otherwise if you want to check how to get this IP Address then Go to Network Place Properties and Double Click the "Local Area Network" Click the "Support" tab and there you will find "Default" in the default column IP Address is you Router IP address, 

Open you Browser and put the 192.168.1.1 IP and press Enter, Put the Username & password, Go to the WAN Configuration and find the DNS setting 

Now enter in the primary and secondary DNS addresses and apply changes. Again according to Google you can interchange the Primary and secondary address, but don’t use the same number for both. We set ours up as the following:

Primary:  8.8.8.8

Secondary: 8.8.4.4

After you apply the DNS changes your router may need to restart, where in the case of a Belkin it is a 40 second reboot. After the router reboots, go through and test the settings to verify they work.

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Resolve IP Address Conflict on Network

Each device connected to a network is assigned a unique IP address to identify it to the network. When one IP address is accidentally assigned to more than one device, an IP address conflict occurs. If your computer is using an IP address that is conflicting with another device, you will get a pop-up error telling you that the system has detected a conflict. To find out where the conflicting device is, check the system log for your computer and look up the conflicting device's MAC address by using the IPconfig command.

Find Which Device or User trying to Conflict your Network IP Address

The way to understand, the IP Conflicts.

• Access the Control Panel through the Start Button or you can reach with command prompt (Go to the "Run" and type "control" and press enter)
• Select the "Administrative Tools" on List
• Again select the "Event Viewer" 
• Select the "System" Option in Event Viewer (Local)

• You find the "Red" Error in Source "Tcpcip" double click that one. 

• Now read the description you will find the IP address which is conflict and the Source Mac Address also you will find, Which Hardware try to conflict you IP Address. 
• After get the Mac address download the IPScanner and search the Mac address.
• If you find the Mac address then this user or device try to conflict you IP Address. 

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Network Diagram | 6 Free Diagram Application for Network

At some point, every administrator will need to diagram a network. For some, it's their primary duty, and they tend to rely on powerful, But for those who need to use a diagramming tool only occasionally, a cheaper solution is best. Luckily, there are several free apps that handle the task well.

Here are five tools that can help you diagram your network without breaking your budget. Some are Windows-only, while others are cross platform.

CADE was developed primarily as a CAD tool, but it also serves as a handy network diagramming tool. It's a 2D vector editor for Windows. Although it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of some costlier tools, it can handle the task of diagramming your network with ease.

Dia (Figure B) is an open source, GTK+ diagramming tool that has a shallow learning curve and can help you create basic network diagrams. Like CADE, Dia was inspired by Visio — but with a much more casual approach and feel. Dia loads and saves XML formatted documents that are gziped by default to save space. Dia is also available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Diagram Designer (Figure C) is another freeware tool that suffers (like Dia) from looking a bit on the outdated side. But Diagram Designer’s ease of use should certainly make up for the old-school feel of the application. DD features include customizable template objects, a spell checker, import/export (WMF, EMF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, MNG, ICO, GIF, and PCX), a slide show viewer, a graph plotter, a calculator, MeeSoft Image Analyzer integration, and compressed file format.

Gliffy (Figure D) is the only Web-based tool on this list. It’s easy to use and it works on any platform. With the ability to drag and drop shapes from numerous object libraries, you can have your network diagram ready in no time. You can use Gliffy for free, but if you really want to get into creating some diagrams, you may want to pony up the $4.95/month fee for 200 diagrams, 200 MB of storage, public and private diagrams, and unlimited collaborators.

yEd (Figure E) is a Java-based tool that’s available for Windows and Linux. It has a great user interface and features diagram creation, auto-layout, data import (GraphML, Excel XLS, GEDCOM, GML, XML), and data export (PDF, SWF, JPG, GIF, BMP, and HTML image maps). The auto-layout feature is particularly cool. It uses a wide range of sophisticated layout algorithms to automatically arrange your diagrams, saving you time and effort.

Office Visio 2007 Office Visio Professional 2007 is helping IT and business professionals worldwide visualize, analyze, and communicate complex information, systems, and processes. Extend Office Visio 2007 programmatically or integrate it with other applications to fit your industry-specific scenarios. Develop your own custom solutions and shapes, or use those from Visio Solution Providers. Embed and program the Visio drawing environment to include the power of Visio in any smart client application.

The all above tools are free for use, Use these tools and describe you network diagram and each network point, full feature and support on Windows and Mac OS.

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How to Find Your Computer Public & Private IP Address ?

An IP address (or Internet Protocol address) identifies each networked computer and device on a network. When computers communicate with each other on the Internet or a local network, they send information to each other’s IP addresses.

Your computer likely has public and private IP addresses. You’ll need the IP address if you’re hosting server software – the client computers will need your computer’s IP address to connect to it.

Public vs. Private IP Addresses

IP addresses can be either public or private. “Public” means an IP address can be reached from the Internet, while “private” means it can’t. For example, in a typical home network, a router has a public IP address on the Internet. The computers, smartphones, game consoles, and other devices behind the router all have unique private IP addresses on the home network. The router acts as an intermediary, forwarding traffic to the local IP addresses that request it. From an outside perspective, all devices on the home network are communicating with the Internet from a single public IP address.

Assuming you’re behind a router performing network address translation, you have two IP addresses that matter. Your computer’s IP address is likely a private IP address, probably starting with 192.168 — is a range of IP addresses specially allocated to private networks. You also likely have a public IP address, which is used when communicating with other computers over the Internet.

For example, if you’re hosting a server on your computer, people on the Internet will need the public IP address from your router to connect to your server. People behind your router — on the same local network as your computer — will need the local IP address from your computer to connect.

If your computer is connected directly to the Internet with no router sitting in between, your computer’s IP address is a public IP address.

Finding Your Private IP Address

To find your computer’s IP Address on Windows, open the Control Panel and select View network status and tasks.

Click the name of your Internet connection to view its status.

Click the Details button in the connection’s status window.

You’ll find the IP address listed in the Network Connection Details window – look for the IPv4 Address field

A quick way to find your IP address in Windows is by running the ipconfig command in a Command Prompt window. You’ll see your IP address in the IPv4 Address row beneath the name of your connection.

 Finding Your Public IP Address

The easiest way to find your public IP address is by asking a website, since that website sees your public IP address and can tell it to you – for example, you can search for what is my ip or what is my ip address on Google. Google will display your public IP address.

You can also access your router’s administration page to find this information. This page displays your public IP address and other information about your Internet connection. Different routers have different administration page layouts and different default local IP addresses – consult your router’s manual if you need more information.

Unlike street addresses, IP addresses aren’t necessarily fixed. Your Internet service provider may regularly assign you a new IP address, just as your router may occasionally assign your devices new IP addresses.      

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