Helping a friend connect to Talk Talk broadband

She was having problems, and wanted to know if a DSL modem was a router, so she could just wireless into her DSL modem, seeing as she was having such problems getting it to work.

So... what was the manufacturer name and model of her DSL modem?

smartAX MT882.

A quick search later pulled up the fact it was indeed a modem and a router, as well as some interesting links:
The user manual for the Huawei SmartAX MT882 can be downloaded from driverguide.com [driverid=503416]

There was a Talk Talk specific page at kitz.co.uk which had the following snippets:

You are best connecting this router using ethernet and following the instructions on the setup sheet for an Apple Mac computer.
Ethernet

If you use Ethernet you wont need to install any software on your PC. Simply:-
~ Connect the router to your computers Network card using the supplied network cable
~ Browse to http://192.168.1.1
~ Log in using the default settings username = admin and password = admin
~ From the left hand menu select Basic
~ Select WAN settings
~ Click on the pencil icon on the top right hand side
~ Set your username and password as given in your TalkTalk welcome letter
which should be in the format of yourphoneno@talktalk.net
~ Click Submit
~ Click Save all
~ Click OK

and a discussion on the broadbandbuyer.co.uk forums about connecting to Talk Talk using that Modem/Router.

Artec Ultima 2000e+ scanner, and how to get it to work.

First of all, you need to get hold of the firmware for the scanner.

In both Windows and the Unices, there is a little bit of firmware that gets uploaded into the scanner - as far as I can see it gets uploaded every time the scanner is used. (This is some new definition of firmware that I wasn't previously aware of. It seems to get loaded into the scanner's volatile memory rather than being actual firmware).

For the Artec Ultima 2000e+ scanner, this piece of software is e2kPlus.usb and it is kept in \windows\system32\drivers

I got it by going to the Artec web site (I Googled "Artec Taiwan") and clicking on "Customer Support" | "Downloads", scrolling down to the bottom of the page to "Legacy Product Drivers" and clicking on "Legacy Products", an then looking for:
Ultima 2000 E+ Scanner driver only for Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
Notice: If your system is Win XP, please follow Readme for updating.


Select V1.32 from the drop down at the right hand side. In Konqueror, nothing happened for me. So I fired up Firefox, and headed back to http://www.artec.com.tw/Service_e/nl/home/Old_drivers.htm

The file that appeared in my download folder was called V132.exe. Time to use it in my installation of Wine.

I copied it to /home/insert-your-user-account-name-here/.wine/drive_c/ and right clicked in Konqueror to set the permissions to 'executable'

I then ran it at the command-line via wine c:\\V132.exe. (in fact, I ran it by

wine c:\\V132.exe &> /home/insert-your-user-account-name-here/scannerInstall.log
so that if there were any problems, I could look at the logfile.

It went swimmingly - second time round. The first time, either the download got corrupted, or I had not set V132.exe to be executable.

V132.exe was a self-extracting zipfile, which extracted several files to \windows\temp - the important file is e+V132.exe.

I right-clicked in Konqueror, set the permissions for \windows\temp\e+V132.exe to executable, and ran it via

wine c:\\windows\\temp\\e+V132.exe

It installs a shedload of files, but the interesting one is c:\windows\system32\drivers\e2kPlus.usb

Blogspot crashed Konqueror. Again

I pressed the 'Edit' button for an earlier entry, and down went Konqueror. The KCrash information is in this logfile.