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I've got a Virgin Mobile MC760 3G USB Modem, and am wrapping up using a wok skimmer as a parabolic antenna for it. I'm using a 11" skimmer, and went from two to four bars signal. Just have to finish the mounting and I'll be able to use it with our house wifi network through our router (it has a usb port and with dd-wrt I can use that for a failover connection when Comcast goes down). Here's the basic idea of it: http://geobray.com/2010/02/07/woktenna-for-3g/ Same idea, using USB wifi adapters: http://www.usbwifi.orconhosting.net.nz/

war4peace:
I was in your exact position a few months ago. My Core 2 Duo E4300 wasn't cutting it for new games like Crysis 2 or LA Noire even though I had it overclocked +66% to 3000Mhz, fairly close to the same performance as your E6750. So I decided it was time for an upgrade, and I set out looking for the cheapest CPU that could handle any modern game at around 40 fps or more.

I was all set to buy a brand new cpu+motherboard+ram kit from newegg, but at the last minute I checked on eBay and I found it was cheaper to just get a quad-core cpu for my old socket 775 system. After all, I already had plenty of fast DDR2-800 memory and I was 100% satisfied with my Gigabyte 965P-DS3 motherboard, so why chuck them out if I can still make use of them? Instead of paying $230+ for a Sandy Bridge Core i3 2100 kit, I just bought an old Core 2 Quad Q6700 for about $125, and sold my old E4300 a week later for $25 to recoup some of the money I spent. The Q6700 is great... it's basically two E6750s glued together on one package, and at stock clocks it is about 90%-100% as fast in modern multi-threaded games as a core i3 2100, which would have cost just as much as my Q6700 for the cpu alone, never mind the new board and memory I would need. And really I probably paid a little too much for the Q6700 at $125... if you are patient I bet you can get a used Q6700 for $80-$100 off eBay or maybe Craigslist. One tip if you go the used route: make sure the cpu was just pulled out of some some boring office workstation computer from 2007. You do NOT want a cpu that once lived in some 14-year-old's gaming pc that was overclocked to the max with some $20 off-brand power supply.

The TDP for the Q6700 is 95W because it uses the dual-die 65nm "Kentsfield" design, but even so I think your Scythe heatsink (good choice on that, by the way...) should have no trouble handling 95W quietly. But if 95W still sounds like it's just too much heat for you, you might want to look into the 45nm "Yorkfield" chips, if I recall correctly they vary between 65W and 95W. Be aware, though, that not all socket 775 motherboards will support 45nm CPUs, even if you flash to the latest BIOS. You'll want to check with your motherboard vendor to make sure that your model supports 45nm chips (my Gigabyte 965P-DS3 does not support them, else I would have purchased a 45nm Q9650 with a better clock rate and more L2 cache than a Q6700).

Oh, just remembered something about the Q6700 - if you leave it at or below stock frequency (2666 Mhz), it will almost certainly tolerate a good deal of under-volting, (your motherboard almost certainly supports voltage control if you can overclock with it). In my case, stock voltage is 1.27500V, but I got it down to 1.12500V, totally stable through 72 hours of torture testing. This reduced the cpu power consumption from 95 W to 73 W, based on this wattage calculator.

Lately I've been gaming with headphones, so noise is not much of issue anymore, and I've found that I can get my Q6700 up to 3333 Mhz at 1.40000V (this is on a mediocre Thermaltake i1 heatsink) completely stable through 72 hours torture testing, temperatures between 44 C idle and 77 C full load, (last I checked, the "Kentsfield" Core 2 Quads are good to go at any overclock so long as they stay both under 1.50000V and under 80 C). At this overclocked speed, my 5-year-old Q6700 beats out a Core i3 2100 pretty handily. Overclocked, my Q6700 consumes a ton of power at 143 W (+51% more than stock power consumption), but it's getting chilly at my latitude this time of year and I could use a space heater anyway :P. Still, the +25% boost to clock speed is very noticeable when paired with my Radeon 7850 2GB, especially in cpu-heavy games like LA Noire and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Btw, the Radeon 7850 is an unbeatable mid/mid-high range graphics card if heat/power consumption is a concern... it's noticeably faster than a GTX 560 Ti and it trades

Stan Swan's WokFi site from New Zealand: http://www.usbwifi.orconhosting.net.nz/
Fast european mirror: http://exe64.com/mirror/wokfi/

How the fuck did this get +5 insightful?

I googled 'new zealand isps', clicked on the second link, ended up at this page: http://www.newzealandisp.orconhosting.net.nz/new_zealand_ISP_directory.htm

There's 7 'major' providers. 6 of which are available anywhere in the country. There are additionally about 20 smaller providers, but I have no idea how widely they operate.

Look, just because that's the situation in America doesn't mean that the rest of the world has devolved into an effective monopoly.

Head to http://www.usbwifi.orconhosting.net.nz/, they have a lot of similar plans for DIY parabolas. In general, the trick is to to aim a flashlight at the parabola, and mount the transceiver at the focal point of the reflected light. If you have a "spider skimmer" type tool or any other mesh basket instead of a solid pan, line the basket with reflective aluminum foil, then you can use the flashlight trick. Voila, you now have a directional antenna.

It'll likely perform as well as a "proper booster", assuming you can find one.

I came accross the USB Wifi site by accident a couple years back. I recalled seeing the dim-sum scoops in the local chinese mini-mart up the road, so I went up and bought one (NZ$4.50), and leaned it behind my modem's wireless antenna, then went to my garage sleepout for guests, which previously was out of range. Using NetStumbler, I watched the graph while a friend adjusted the scoop in the house. It went up to a usable "Good/Excellant" signal.

I havent investigated why, but a wire mesh scoop seems better than a sold dish(Engineers will know I am sure).

Salvaged from the internet - http://spaceghost.orconhosting.net.nz/christmas.html

salvaged from the depths of the inter-tubes, working link with pics and videos from original thread http://spaceghost.orconhosting.net.nz/christmas.html

If you want something fast that will tell you if there is any trouble reading the disk go here, or if you want something more complex that'll go by sector go here.

Oh and in the future if the software needed can be Windows software,allow me to suggest Freeware World Team. FWT have hands down the best freeware search engine I have ever seen. You simply type into the search box what you want the software to do and they'll find you a piece of freeware that does it. I use it here at the shop all the time when myself or a customer has a job that needs filling. No spyware,no trialware,just great freeware with a truly great search engine to find it with.

I guess the satellite dish connects to a small town and relay through wireless means such as http://www.usbwifi.orconhosting.net.nz/

In that case, there might be fund raising campaigns for a few containers of Chinese parabolic cookware and wifi dongles.

http://www.usbwifi.orconhosting.net.nz/

Mentioned twice before in these comments (that I could see), but not modded up so here's another mention... Use a pair of woks or other parabolic kitchen implements... mesh is good for wind damage reduction... point one at the other and bingo, 3 to 10km range for the price of woks and 2 USB WiFi adaptors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WokFi

http://www.usbwifi.orconhosting.net.nz/

Chinese cookware and a USB WiFi will do the trick:
http://www.usbwifi.orconhosting.net.nz/