Friday, May 23, 2008

Skype Call Quality

If you're attempting to improve your Skype call quality one thing to consider is Quality of Service setting on the router. Especially in cases where you do a lot of multitasking or you're using a network that has other users adjusting the QoS settings can have a noticeable impact on the quality of your calls.

The attached article walks you through updating the router software, dd-wrt, to give priority to Skype information traveling over your network. It provided a noticeable change to my Skype calls. An easy way to test the changes is to use the Skype Test Call functionality and listen to your voice during the playback.

DD-WRT Tutorial 4: Defining Priorities with QoS

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Alternative Way To Force Logoff In Terminal Client/Remote Desktop

Due to my working from a hotel and the way they set up their network I was only able to VPN into a client's network and connect to one of their servers. There were connectivity issues at the hotel and their network would keep dropping my connection. Last time I connected it said I had exceeded the maximum number of connects on the only server I could connect to remotely....uh oh.

After some search I found a few tools available in the Windows Server 2003 Administrator Pack I've got installed on an XP laptop. For the example below we're going to assume the IP address of the server is 192.168.1.100

C:\>qwinsta /SERVER:192.168.1.100
SESSIONNAME -- USERNAME -- ID -- STATE -- TYPE -- DEVICE
rdp-tcp#166 -- myuser -- 2 -- Active -- rdpwd
rdp-tcp#169 -- myuser -- 1 -- Active -- rdpwd

Using the ID of #1 above we disconnect that user.
C:\>rwinsta /SERVER:192.168.1.100 1