One of my favorite perks of my job is that I am constantly learning something new. Even the most seasoned computer expert will never be short of new material.

Today, my lesson was that yes, a microwave can bring a wireless network to its knees.

It was hard to believe at first, but after a few tests it was most certainly the microwave to blame. It seemed to me that this should be a cause for concern and that this sort of radiation could be a sign of something perhaps dangerous. Later, I began some research. According to this article, tests indicate a Microwave oven can degrade network performance by up to 85%. In the case I experienced today, it killed it entirely. However, the article also notes that Microwaves operate at a fairly narrow frequency range, which allows us to alter the WIFI frequency channel to compensate. Often, routers do a scan themselves to see which channel is the clearest, but unless the microwave is running while it does this scan, this will not help.

Some cordless phones are known to interfere with the spectrum as well. Wireless b products operate on the same frequency as older cordless phones (2.4 GHz – close to the same frequency as Microwave ovens) and thus can cause heavy interference. Newer “digital band” cordless phones are available in the 6 GHz range to combat this phenomenon.

Wireless N routers – the newest wireless format available and undoubtedly the best – can eliminate this issue by operating in the 5 GHz range instead of the 2.4 GHz, but all devices in the home would have to be Wireless j technology. Unfortunately, the technology is so new (the technology standard was only officially ratified in October of 2009) that most consumer devices are still b or g technology unless manufactured late 2009.

Most modern wireless routers should have an option to change the frequency channel. For information on how to do this, consult your device documentation or a local computer technician.

One thing I picked up from my time working with HP and our regional hospitals, it was the novelty of naming conventions. Being a closet Star Trek nerd I recognized the names pretty quick. Enterprise, Reliant, Defiant, Antares. These are federation ship names. This piece of trivia escaped most of my colleagues and I wasn’t about to make fun of them for not being nerdy enough.

Then my another job site featured space objects. Our Firewall server was Sun, our file server Earth, a giant beast of a server we purchased and called Galaxy (which contained a number of VMWare servers), our secondary Domain Controller was Mars, while printers were typically named after orbiting moons. I’m sure you see the correlation.

I never much liked the names of our planets due to Roman mythological origin. For some reason I always took it personal that it was blatantly stolen from the Greeks and simply relabelled. The Greeks were far more inventive and original. And so I always had in mind the naming convention my domain would have.

A year or so ago I began to realize that vision.

I configured a local domain controller which I named Zeus. The domain I called Pantheon.local. My “Windows Home Server” is Athena, the goddess of Wisdom (as my backup server, this is the repository of all my information). My development server is Haphaestus: the god of the forge, and the inspiration for my site banner. My wife’s PC which she inherited from me is Aphrodite – the goddess of love.

I rent a suite from my parents upstairs. But it’s not a typical nerd living in his mom’s basement kind of situation. As such, I’ve included my mom’s system in the domain and her laptop is Hera. Technically this is a departure from the naming convention since Hera was the wife of Zeus and thus should have equal power, say, as a secondary domain controller. But somehow I remember Hera as “mother” better due to my fondness of the TV shows Hercules and Xena. And don’t think the parallel is lost on her, as I think she’s mildly offended I equated her with the evil queen of the gods.

There is also Demeter, who I configured as a secondary development server and yet I can’t recall why I named her that – she was the bringer of seasons. Of course then I have my trusty Samsung CLP-610 ND (Color Laser Printer with Network+Duplexing), which is Hermes the messenger of the gods, whose label I found particularly fitting.

And that pretty much covers it. My server needs are always expanding as do the names. Some servers have come and gone like Strife, Atalanta, Hercules or Hades, so these names sort of sit in a pool until I have need of another.

Anyone care to share their domain server naming convention?

I will make this short and simple.

If your computer can’t boot up without hitting the dreaded blue screen of death, it could be one of two things. A software problem or a hardware problem (not coincidentally, this is all a computer problem could ever be unless it’s the computer owner’s fault). How to get into safe mode is outside the scope of the article.

Here’s the short and simple part: if your computer blue-screens in safe mode with no peripherals plugged in, it is a hardware problem. Take a backup of the drive and try to re-install Windows. If either the backup or install fails, it’s probably a hard drive or RAM problem, but usually it’s a drive problem.

I went to a local vocational school called CDI College and took what they then called the Network Admin curriculum. It started out very simply with a course called A+ which is the standard certification for PC hardware repair. I say it started out simply because it’s really uphill from there. Hardware is the first building block that any self-respecting IT professional should know inside and out, but whether or not you spring for the actual certification is more a matter of whether the current job market demands it.

Did I need to go to school for it? No. I had enough computers to experiment with at home that I could have read the A+ textbook and aced the test within a couple of weeks. What school did provide is a structured environment and ultimately some connections for me to utilize later on. Actually the same thing was true of the rest of the course. I could easily have done it at home with the tools I already had. For all the money spent on schooling, I could have just checked out the list of textbooks and gone to town reading them. As it is, I was privately funded so was not required to attend every day. So I ended up doing the work from home all week, then I’d show up on Friday, do a quick 15 minute test and go back home. Aside from the more complex network theory course which covered IP addressing, subnetting, binary math and DNS, I generally completed a course a week. And graduated with honours.

To be a successful PC technician, you only really need three things. A knack for problem solving, patience, and a mastery of Google searches. When my brain fails me, Google never does. You can find anything on Google. But even Google has its shortcomings. If ever I have a problem finding something, I know that I’m simply asking the wrong question, or using the wrong search words. So try a few combinations – sometimes I even have to dumb down the language to be a bit more vague before finding what I’m looking for, since the majority of the internet public aren’t experts and probably don’t know the correct terms for things.

Most of my clients still refer to the Tower as the “Hard Drive” or the monitor as the “computer”. This is a daily problem.

The computer technician’s worst enemy is coincidence. I dread the times when I take a sickly PC to the shop for one problem and return it to my client, only to have it returned to me a few days later with a new problem, and a strong sense that they suspect I caused it. For example, a couple weeks back I took in a computer that was laden with viruses. I took it away and wiped it, returned it, and the very next day their video card started glitching up on them, with visual artifacts all over the screen and textures all distorted. They were very nice actually and at I never got the sense that they thought it was my fault, but I always dread the coincidence. After all, who was the last person to mess with the insides of their computer?

I experiment a lot. Quite often I’ll work on a home network or server project simply because I’ve never performed it before. From Virtual servers using Hyper-V or VMWare, to Virtual LANs, self-web and email hosting, Dynamic DNS, cabling, VPN, RIS, and much more. Never underestimate the value of experimentation, even if what you do now doesn’t require it. The most valuable thing you can have is knowledge that your peers don’t.

Another skill you’ll find useful is a good memory for details. I once spent the better part of two years travelling to ranger stations and remote forestry offices all over British Columbia. I was participating in a workstation rollout program for IBM (who was in the middle of its “Lenovo” name change), the Ministry of Forests, and the Ministry of Environment. When you personally crank out 4-8 computers in a day, the patterns show up really fast. Clients or other techs would come to me for solutions and at times couldn’t even finish a sentence before I knew exactly what the problem was. Workplace experience is all about recognizing the patterns.

And lastly what you’ll need is a passion for the field. I’ve known technicians and programmers who don’t even own a computer. Personally I believe this severely limits their  potential. It could be argued that they at least have a life outside of work, but the truth is if you don’t love your work, you’ll never rise above your peers.