Category: Technology

I acquired an early power line network kit to reach my printer at one end of the house, a few years ago. It was a Devolo kit with two transparent blue adapters saying 85Mbps on the outside.

Years went by and I needed to extend Wifi coverage to an upstairs bedroom, so bought a Netgear WiFi extender, with the words AV200 in the name. Sometimes this worked ok, but mainly it was a disaster and drove me mental, the connection to the external internet took a couple of minutes to stabilise, and was generally flaky.

I tried plugging the adapters directly into the wall, and tried other wall sockets. I investigated Wifi channels, I considered using a divining rod to find a good network signal, and finally considering burning the house down.

Then I came across this post: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/basics/lanwan-basics/31238-slow-homeplug-five-ways-to-boost-powerline-network-speed

The magic answer is this: Don’t mix the 85Mbps equipment with the 200Mbps equipment, they don’t work on the same set of power wires, by removing the Devolo adapters the whole thing stabilised. I test the Netgear unit upstairs and got a solid 30Meg as reported by Speedtest, as I have fibre broadband from Plusnet.

Image you need to get contacts from the Mac (in vCard format) into a new MS Exchange account, on the face of it this isn’t easy. But, so you know, it’s actually straightforward. Don’t look at the File->Import option, do this:

• Export your contacts from your Mac address book into .vcf format – it will make one big file with them all in
• Open Outlook 2014 for Mac
• Click on the Contacts tab
• Drag and drop the file above onto the Contacts list
• You should see a green + sign, Outlook should then import the contacts

This worked well for me, to take contacts from an old MS Exchange account into the new one.

For reference, I used the Mac address book to export the contacts from the old Exchange account to a .vcf file first. There are few clues on-line that the drag and drop technique above will work, let alone from Microsoft or Apple.