Casual Conversation

I am a hobbyist computer and IT guy. Not professionally trained but I grew up with the technology and have been tinkering with them for years. I am still learning new things and enjoy deeping my understanding. Troubleshooting is often a great journey to discovering new insights.

Shelved in the basement was a desktop pc released in 2018. Ryzen 5 2600 6 core CPU, 24GB DDR4 RAM, and an AMD RX580. These days such specs are modest compared to the latest and greatest but still pretty good IMO. If I remember right, it was having some graphical issues probably caused by a hdmi cable or something. It was a long time ago, no idea why such a good PC ended up collecting dust. Oh well, as a silver lining this story is about giving the PC new life.

This week I began tinkering around with local AI. LLama 3.1 8b just got released; I have been having lots of fun learning with it on the laptop. Sadly my poor old thinkpad is just not meant for that kind of work. It was sloow to generate text and process information..

So remembering the 6 core desktop in the basement, the time felt right to dust off the PC and get it to do some useful computing. Unfortunately while the specs are powerful, the things wifi never worked right for some reason. I never thought much about it since the PC was situated next to a router with Ethernet as a connection. Now it needs to live significantly further away and rely solely on wifi for big file transfers.

On an internet connection where my laptops right next to it were getting hundreds of mbps download, the pc was getting 10mbps. Ive had metal cased desktops before and none of them were this bad connection wise. Something was seriously wrong bottlenecking an otherwise great setup. So at first I figured it must have been a linux driver issue or some kind of software bug. Spent hours installing the right drivers for my specific wifi card and troubleshooting via terminal. Didn't help any.

Then I figured maybe the card was bust and researched new wifi cards. I always thought wifi cards were little chips and antennas built into the motherboard. Not the case with this computer.

My first important discovery was that this computer had a huge wifi card mounted just underneath graphics card taking up its own slot in the back. This makes sense, if you want to upgrade to the newest wifi frequency in 10-20 years just pop a updated card into the slot.

My second important discovery was realizing the beastly wifi card had two little brass bits connecting out behind the PC. Threaded bits. Hey I know these, they are male coaxial bits.... For an... antenna.... facepalm

The realization hit me like a club. Oh... OH. YOOO IT NEEDS ANTENNAS, DUDE. I had been using a radio technology with either no antenna or an inbuilt one so awful it might as well be malfunctioning.

I felt like an idiot, have seen the back of that PC many times but for some reason just never noticed or thought about the coaxial bits and what they could be for. Oh well lets just order some cheap sticks and hope it helps.

So I with the cheap set of antennas in hand, I screwed them on. Honestly expected it not to do anything because its never that simple. Fired up speedtest before and after installation. Before antennas was 10mbps up and down After installing the antennas >200mbps down and >100mpbs up. Yeeeeah looks like that took care of the issue right away.

In the future ill look on the back of my big desktops and see if they could be easily upgraded with a set of antennas. The more you know!