122 JANUARY2020|COMPUTER SHOPPER|ISSUE383
HELPFILE&BUSINESSHELP
Ilive in afairly modern, three-story hhhouse.
Although we have Cat5 network cabling to
the living room and bedrooms, we rely on
our wireless network forour phones and
laptops. In our current setup,our Skykyyy
router has its Wi-Fi radio disabled and
just plugs intoacentral Gigabit switccchto
supply internet access to the network.
There’s awireless router in the top
bedroom, which provides 2.4GHz anddd
5GHz coverage forthe house.
Except it doesn’t quitereach
everywhere.Through trial and error, I’ve
found that having the wireless routerrron
the topfloor works better than puttinnnnngggg
it with the other network hardware ooon
the ground floor,but either wayweeeend
up with acoupleofsmall dead spots
where our devices tend to drop off thhhe
network. The ideal solution would
obviously be to put the router on theee
first floor,but nobody wants it
flashing awayintheir bedroom.
The router has three external aeriaaals
that can be rotated and tilted througgghhh 999000
degrees. Is there an optimal configuration
that might help us get reliable coverage
everywhere? I’ve tried puttingthem at
right angles to each other,but that
seemed to make things worse.
Andy Fletcher
In our experience,moving arouter’s antennas
around makes little odds when the signal is
Off in all
directions
already good, but in dead spots it can make
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borderline unusable and one that’s stable
enough to live with. The trick is to understand
that an antenna radiates its wireless signal in
akind of thick disc shape,almost as though
the antenna is poking through the hole in the
centre of aWi-Fi doughnut.
Understand this, and you can get a
better idea of where to angle the antennas.
Usually,it’s best to keep all three aligned
in one dimension, forexample by bending
aaallllllooovvveeerrrbbbyyy 999000 dddeeegggrrreeeeeesssssttthhheeennnjjjuuussstttrrroootttaaatttiiinnnggg
themin relation to the router.Try to
envisage the ‘doughnuts’,and angle the
antennas so that their signals will cover
the entire house.
Generally,you shouldn’t have an angle
of more than 45 degrees between the two
outside antennas, and it usually works
best to position the middle one roughly
between them(see the image above).
Afew months ago my daughter finally
talked me out of continuing to use my
ancient Acer netbook, which still runs
Windows XP.She bought me a
Chromebook, which I’ve used with some
success, although I’m still struggling to
work out how to do everything I’m used
to doing on Windows.
As acaseinpoint, my old HP printer
recently gave up the ghost, and Idecided
to replace it with an Epson EcoTank
ET-2710. Unfortunately,only once it
arrived did Irealise that it doesn’t have a
display, so Icouldn’t manually join it to
my wireless network. Eventually I
discovered Icould dust off my Windows
XP PC, run Epson’s setup program, have it
connect via USB and magically configure
the printer formynetwork.
With this done,Imanaged to access
the printer from my Chromebook, and it
works well. Unfortunately,however,I
can’t work out how to scan. Any pointers?
David McNamara
Ascanplan
Unfortunately,there’s no native scanner
support in Chrome OS, but there maybe
some ways around it. Many multifunction
peripherals (MFPs) nowoffer direct access
to Google Drive,for example,making it
possible to scan directly to yourdrive
and access the documents fromthe
Chromebook. Others support scans to a
USBdrive,which you could then simply
plug intothe Chromebook. Some HP MFPs
allowyou to initiateand save ascan from
their web administration interface.
Unfortunately,none of these options
will work with your ET-2710.
If your Chromebook supports Android
apps, you might try installing Epson iPrint
and seeing if it will discover your printer.
However,when we tried this with a
Chromebook and acouple of Epson MFPs,
the app couldn’t detect either of them
and wouldn’t work with themwhen we
manually entered their IP addresses.
The app usually works perfectly well on
standard Android or iOS devices, however:
⬅Nomore
than 45
degrees
between the
first and third
antennas, and
think of the
doughnuts
⬆IfyourChromebook won’t scan, the next best
plan is to use Google Drive on your phone
if you have either available,you could use
iPrint to scan documents fromthe phone,
and either save themin alocal folder or to
your Google Drive.
