Month: October 2010

T510 Wireless Problems, Connection Drops

I got a new Lenovo T510 laptop at work. My old T60 was on its last leg and was needing some rest. It got to the point where it would literally take about 30 minutes for the thing to fully boot up and become usable. The T510 is nice. The screen is bright and wide, the keyboard is great. The trackpad is a little bit quirky, but that’s probably more a reflection of what I’m used to than anything.

The one main (big, huge) complaint that I have about this thing is that the wireless connection constantly drops, as in (literally) every 60 seconds. The connection will be acceptable, but will literally drop every 60 seconds. It is absolutely maddening.

I have a Linksys WRT160N router (WPA2, static channel, etc) and am running W7 (32-bit). I have 5 other devices connecting to this same router, without issue:

1. Dell XPS M1330 (W7 64-bit)
2. Lenovo T60 (mentioned above, running WXP)
3. Wii
4. Blackberry
5. iMac G5 (an old one — PPC!)

I did have problems with the Dell once upon a time, but a new wireless card solved that one. Perhaps that is what is needed here?

I un-installed the Thinkpad Access Connections software and am just allowing Windows to manage the connection. I also updated the drivers from the Real Tek website. They released a new version last week. As I’ve been typing this post, my connection has dropped and reconnected probably 5 times.

I’m not sure what to do next. Any suggestions?

Update: Well I turned off the wireless N and am just connecting with G. It works OK now.

Update 2: I’m still having the problem where the wireless connection will not return after the computer goes to sleep. It’s incredibly annoying. I end up having to reboot the machine to get the wireless connection back. I’ve tried all sorts of stuff with the power management settings, etc., but nothing really seems to work. Has anyone else experienced this?

Configurable EndPoint for WCF Connecting to Authorize.NET’s ARB

Configuring a WCF service in a class library has been something that has been a struggle for me in the past. There was always something that I knew should be done differently, as it just didn’t “feel” right to have to recompile the class library when we move from a test environment to a production environment.

This specific example uses WCF to connect to Authorize.NET’s ARB service for creating subscriptions.

Here is what I came up with:

// Be sure to configure this in the database for the various environments, as needed
EndpointAddress ea = new EndpointAddress(YourDataAccess.GetUrl);

// HTTPS
BasicHttpBinding serviceBinding = new BasicHttpBinding(BasicHttpSecurityMode.Transport);
serviceBinding.ReceiveTimeout = new TimeSpan(0,0,0,20);
ARB.ServiceSoapClient service = new ARB.ServiceSoapClient(serviceBinding, ea);
ARB.ARBCreateSubscriptionResponseType response;

// Set the credentials
authentication = new ARB.MerchantAuthenticationType();
authentication.name = this.AuthNetName();
authentication.transactionKey = this.AuthNetTxn();
response = service.ARBCreateSubscription(authentication, sub);