With the likelihood of multiple devices on any given home network ever increasing, most households now contain some form of a router. A router is the simplest manner to allow for multiple network connections to share a single external  connection – like the one to your Internet provider. Routers are protected by a password and if you’ve followed best-practice, you’ve changed it from the default password to something more secure and memorable – hopefully. The problem is, a router is basically an appliance; it sits on the desk or otherwise out-of-sight and does it’s job once it’s been configured. It’s quite possible that after initial setup and changing of the password you never access it again. Now, this becomes a problem because passwords that aren’t used often are more likely to be forgotten. If this is the case, what are you options?

Many routers have a physical device reset switch on the back that will restore the configuration to it’s shipping state from the manufacturer. It’s not a bad last-ditch effort but it will then require configuring of everything again. There is another option however, but it requires a bit of forward thinking.

It’s an excellent idea to backup your router configuration to a file and store somewhere safe on your computer, if your router supports such a feature – most do however. If you have previously made a configuration backup it’s possible that the router password could then be extracted from that backup.

RouterPassView is another fine utility from NirSoft that attempts to uncover information from router backups such as admin passwords or even wireless keys and passwords. As is commonplace for NirSoft, RouterPassView requires no installation and is dead simple to use – just open your router configuration file from within the application. If the software is able to detect and decrypt the file you will quickly be presented with a tabular view of the data it contains. The passwords should be easily identifiable at this point!

As there are probably hundreds of home routers it’s impossible to expect a free application like RouterPasssView to identify and support them all. However, the software continues to be updated with expanded compatibility so if your router isn’t supported today, check back tomorrow.

RouterPassView currently supports:

• Linksys WRT54GL (With original firmware or Tomato firmware), WRT54G (only some of them), WRT160N, and possibly similar models.
• Edimax BR6204WG, and possibly similar models.
• Siemens ADSL SL2-141, and possibly similar models.
• Dynalink RTA1025W, and possibly similar models.
• NETGEAR WGT624, and possibly similar models.
• ASUS WL-520g, WL-600g, and possibly similar models.
• D-Link DIR-655, DIR-300, and possibly similar models.
• Sanex SA 5100, and possibly similar models.
• Sitecom WL-351, and possibly similar models.
• COMTREND 536+ (Only Internet Login)
• US Robotics 9108 ADSL (internet login and admin login)
• D-Link DSL-2540U/BRU/D ADSL2+, DSL-2650U, DSL-520B
• D-Link DVA-G3170i/PT
• TP-Link TD-8810 ADSL Modem/Router.

Download RouterPassView

As our network bandwidth increases into our homes, we are always finding more ways to saturate the connection. The Internet knows no limits; even a few years back, no one could have imagined the possibilities as high-speed internet has opened the door to exciting opportunities. Today I can stream live television to my home theater PC over the Internet while participating in a VOIP conference call with colleagues from all over the world – all for $45 a month. I believe that’s pretty incredible, don’t you?

Still, our desire for more bandwidth never subsides. Quite likely you’ve come across circumstances where you are taxing the connection just a bit too much and things begin to stall and otherwise degrade to become unusable. Applications are constantly competing for your finite bandwidth – and they don’t always play fair. Streaming Youtube videos is highly bandwidth intensive but it doesn’t need to be so bursty – meaning, it doesn’t need to max your download speed so that you have a 5 minute buffer into the future; certainly not at the expense of latency being introduced into your XBox online experience.

Network prioritizing, or quality of service (QoS), is typically a feature of your home router. Unfortunately, it’s not the most user friendly even though great strides have been made in the last little while. If your home network is relatively simple with perhaps just two network devices, configuring QoS may be overkill to accomplish our traffic limits. Instead, a software-based approach may be more sensible.

NetBalancer is one such application for your traffic prioritizing needs. NetBalancer allows you to configure upload and download constraints on a per-application basis. During the same approach on a router generally requires knowing and understanding port numbers or network protocols. Downloading the latest podcasts is iTunes is important to me, but it’s not overly time sensitive. With NetBalancer, I can configure iTunes into a low priority queue which allows it to continue without interfering with more important network tasks – like perhaps streaming TV show off Hulu.

NetBalancer is available in free and pro versions for Windows, and while I typically don’t speak to paid applications; NetBalancer is worth a look. The free version limits it’s use to 5 configured applications which is not a bad compromise when you think about what all you wish to limit. Still, if you require more flexibility, the Pro version will set you back just $25.

Download NetBalancer

You are probably loosely aware of the concept of sharing files or printers from one computer to another, over the local network. After all, it’s a pretty common scenario even on the home front. What you may not be familiar with is sharing other types of resources – like sound perhaps.

The concept of sharing audio between multiple computers isn’t directly comparable to the logistics of sharing a printer. In the situation of sharing a printer, there exists one printer and more than one computer. Sharing sound is a bit different; you aren’t actually sharing a physical device like a printer, or in this case a sound card, rather you are sharing the audio stream. It’s rather similar to broadcasting a radio station. This problem is of a limited scope but it’s quite well defined and most definitely fits someone’s problem definition.

SpeakerShare is a free Windows and Apple application that can accomplish the sharing of one audio stream across a local network. Putting it bluntly, SpeakerShare can use one computer’s sound output and play it through speakers connected to a remote computer. Has that got your head racing with ideas now?

Sharing is accomplished using Apple’s Bonjour service which is installed alongside iTunes – or separately if you are not an iTunes user. A common client/server architecture is followed which allows for one server to handle multiple clients, or speaker sets as the case may be. Installation and set up is a snap; download and install on the server and each client, configuring the role of each though the interface. That’s it! The lone drawback is the stream is buffered a second or so which results in some lag – an annoying problem if the server and clients are in the same listening circle.

Download SpeakerShare

A high-speed broadband connection is a requirement to get any of the media rich benefits available on the Internet; viewing videos off streaming sites such as YouTube is impossible to enjoy. But what constitutes broadband speed? Oddly, it’s not consistently defined and that leads to a lot of confusion and problems – especially on content intensive sites. Streaming media as a platform and service has matured greatly; for the most part the quality of the experience scales nicely with the speed of the connection. However, things aren’t always perfect; something Google and YouTube have realized.

The YouTube test video is designed to give users feedback to the quality of their Internet connection. While you may pay for a 5MB down connection, that doesn’t give you enough information to truly predict your streaming experience. High latency and packet loss can cause your stream to stutter and drop out – certainly not a pleasurable experience. If you are curious how your existing connection stacks up to users around you, on your ISP, or in the same city, or even country; YouTube provides a graph with that information.

By viewing the test video, feedback is provided for your connection by metrics such as frames per second, dropped frames, and stream speed. You can gather your results by clicking the Show Test Video link.

You can see that even though I feel the quality of my Internet connection is superb, I am still dropping frames. Perhaps a certain percentage of fluctuation is acceptable as I certainly have no complaints when browsing YouTube. How do your results compare? See for yourself on YouTube’s Test Video site.

How many times have you been clicking around on the Internet and come to a page that won’t load? While the webpage could just be gone completely, often times it’s merely a temporary problem – the server may be overwhelmed or otherwise offline. This type of situation can occur often given the popularity of social networking and social media. If a particular website generates some buzz it doesn’t take long for the link to spread throughout Twitter or Facebook. Some servers just don’t cope well with the sudden influx of visitors and it buckles under the strain.

A little geek secret in a time like this involves copying and pasting the entire web address into Google and then use Google Cache from the returned search results. Generally, this is enough to provide you with the information you desired. Still, it’s a multi-step process and since every click matters – a Firefox extension is available to help automate everything.

Gcache+ is a Firefox add-on that can load the Google Cache’d version of the current website with a single click; obviously handy should the site otherwise be unreachable. Installation is straightforward like any Firefox add-on and there really isn’t any post-install configuration necessary.

The Gcache+ process is initiated in one of three ways.

1. By adding a button to your toolbar.



2. By right-clicking on the currently loaded webpage.



3. By right-clicking on the intended destination link.

Download Gcache+ from the Mozilla Firefox Add-ons server.

A MAC address is a series of letters and numbers that identifies your network card on the network, either local or across the Internet. The MAC address is a means to uniquely identify your computer on the network in question, not unlike the IP address – something that is more commonly known and understood. Whereas an IP address is likely assigned via another server, your MAC address is assigned from your network card’s manufacturer, at as such, does not change irregardless whether the network you are on changes – such as if you were at home on your laptop and then migrate to the local hotspot. Your IP address will have changed but the MAC address has not.

From time to time there may be logical reasons that you wished your MAC address was different. Logical does not always equate to legal, but that is not something for me to judge. Since MAC addresses are unique, they can be used to pinpoint ownership of a networked computer. Your ISP may catalog allowed MAC addresses on their network and prevent access from unknown computers. This behavior typically requires you to visit a special webpage operated by your ISP where you authenticate with your credentials and register any new network device. Additionally, it’s not hard to see how organizations like the RIAA would be interested in uniquely identifying a computer and subsequent user on a network.

Irregardless of your reasoning behind it, the MAC address can be changed and it’s actually pretty simple. The free utility Mac MakeUp provides a single interface to change your address. You begin by selecting your network interface from the drop down list and then provide a 12 digit hexadecimal string which becomes your new MAC address. If you are unsure what to change your new MAC address to, or if none of this makes sense, Mac MakeUp can generate a valid address randomly. Assignment is then as simple as clicking Change.

Additional advance features are provided but in the grand scheme of things, they are likely something you do not wish to fuss with as they can cause problems if set incorrectly.

Mac MakeUp is compatible in all iterations of Windows and requires no installation or additional configuration.

Things have been quiet here as of late, mainly due to the holidays, but with the new year under-way it’s time to get back into full swing. A few posts ago I wrote about Google’s attempt to speed up the browsing experience by providing public DNS servers from their vast infrastructure. I detailed how to change your DNS server through the traditional Windows interface – which has remained relatively unchanged since the Windows 95 days, and while it’s not very difficult, it does require a bit of knowledge – namely the IP addresses you wish to switch too.

DNS Jumper is a free Windows utility that greatly simplifies the process – to the tune of a single click! The application is portable and thus requires no installation. DNS Jumper includes a number of DNS server options including Google, Open DNS, and Ultra DNS. My suggestion is to try out Google’s DNS servers yourself since Jumper makes the process so painless, and then decide if the performance difference exists.

Google unveiled yet another free service today, Google Public DNS, which they hope translates into a faster browsing experience for it’s users. If you aren’t familiar with DNS you may think of it like an Internet phone book. If you know a person’s name, using a phone book you can find out how to contact them by finding their phone number. Likewise, if you know a website’s name you may use the DNS infrastructure to determine how to reach them. Here is Google’s explanation:

Most of us aren’t familiar with DNS because it’s often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names – e.g., www.google.com – into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers – e.g., 74.125.45.100 – that computers use to communicate with one another.

DNS is therefor a critical component on today’s Internet. Unfortunately, many ISPs and networks alike provide DNS services on severely under-powered hardware that, while doing it’s job, tends to buckle and become unreliable under load. Google hopes that by using their DNS servers over your ISPs that they’ll be faster, more reliable, and safer. Additionally, DNS servers have the ability to cache their name look-ups which loosely means the more people using a server, the more likely the server has already performed a name look-up previously and therefor already has the results for subsequent queries.

Using Google Public DNS is pretty simple, just use the following IP addresses as your primary and secondary DNS:

• 8.8.8.8
• 8.8.4.4

In Windows Vista & 7 the DNS servers can be changed through the Network and Sharing Center through the Control Panel.

Locate your Local Area Connection adapter and click Properties.

In the Properties dialog select Internet Protocol Version 4 and click Properties.

In the box titled Use the following DNS server addresses input the IP addresses from above.

OK out of all the dialog windows and you will now be pointing to Google for all your DNS look-ups. Should you wish to go back to your ISPs DNS you can repeat the process above but instead of inputting the IP addresses just choose Obtain DNS server address automatically.

Wireless networks or WiFi is all around us – it’s become a game changer for most of us. Nearly every home, office, and coffee shop has some form of wireless Internet available. Initially, WiFi was overly complicated to setup, deploy, and secure but nowadays that is of lesser concern. Vendors have automated the installation process as much possible using software based install and configuration wizards. Really the only issue that users need to be concerned about is the physical placement of the wireless router. Some locations are better than others; high is better than low for example.

Router placement is key to a quality experience. A weak WiFi signal because of poor placement results in a slow and generally unstable connection. Most users treat this placement process as a trial and error until they’ve dialed in the optimum location within their surroundings.  It shouldn’t be of a surprise to anyone that there is software that can facilitate arriving to positive outcome faster and more efficiently than the less scientific approach of trial and error.

HeatMapper is a free application for Windows that collects and visualizes wireless signal strength within your environment. With the software installed on your laptop you traverse your location and plot signal strength points with the click of a button. When you are done with your surveying, HeatMapper produces a heat map of your area based on signal strength. You can quickly address problem points from the visual results and work to address them with some adjustment of the router location.

There is one slight caveat to HeatMapper, to get truly meaningful results you will have to import a floor map of your place. It doesn’t need to be perfect, in fact it could probably be thrown together in something as simple as Paint. If you are in an office environment you probably already have an emergency exit strategy that includes a map of the office – this would be a perfect candidate for HeatMapper.

HeatMapper may be something you only use once in your lifetime but that doesn’t mean it’s any less useful.

If you keep up on all the latest technology news you are likely aware that Microsoft’s next iteration of Windows is coming in October, Windows 7. Those same journalists will also inform you that Windows 7 is nothing more than a refinement of the release Microsoft would quickly like us all to forget, Vista. In other words, Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. Are these pundits correct in their labeling? In my opinion yes, and that’s a great thing to me. Windows 7 may be the best version of Windows yet, but only time will tell.

So what type of refinements does Windows 7 bring over Vista? The spit and polish Vista has received to morph into 7 isn’t immediately apparent but rather reveals itself through increased usage of the new operating system. If you are a tech enthusiast you are likely to discover the subtleties of the release all over the place. Today I discovered one myself that I felt was worth sharing.

If you are a laptop user who frequents multiple networks, perhaps your office and your home, you’ve likely come across a few annoyances relating to your traveling situation. One of which is your default printer. While in the office, your default printer is just at the other end of the hall but what about when you are at home, on that same laptop? Sure you likely have your home printer installed and configured, but it requires explicit selection for each print job. That was then, this is now. Windows 7 affords you the ability to define default printers for each network you may work off of.

1. Launch the Devices and Printers dialog from off the Start Menu in Windows 7.
2. Single click one of your installed printers and then click the Manage default printers button from the left side panel.
3. Using the dialog shown below you are able to match up your existing installed printers with networks your laptop has previously connected to.

That is an example of attention to detail and is one reason Windows 7 is a winner.