Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss a Fortnite tournament, Ring camera false alarm and the police, Olympic champions wearing recycled cell phones, and more.

Jeff in St. Cloud, Minnesota listens on KNSI and asked: “I’m trying to find out what the best option is for extending the WiFi in my house. I have spots here that have weaker signal and I do have quite a few smart devices in my house, so I don’t know if it’s a router issue or if I should invest in a “Web system” or what my best option is.”

Jeff, if you have a lot of devices it may be worth investing in at least a better router.

Inexpensive routers tend to perform a lot worse and you will probably notice a difference right away.

That may not be enough to improve your coverage though. For that, one of those web systems you mentioned — called a wireless mesh — is probably your best bet for a “set it and forget it” system.

Those systems act as a single network, so you don’t have sudden disconnections and reconnections. The different access points just hand over devices to the other access points in the system seamlessly.

That comes at a price, though. Any of these systems from the Orbi, to the Eero, or Google WiFi system will all cost you a few hundred dollars.

How much depends not just on which system you buy, but on how many access points you ultimately need, and that will depend on your square footage and even building materials.

If you want to spend less, you can buy repeaters. They tend not to be as simple to set up or as seamless. You may see disconnections and reconnections, and that can get pretty annoying.

Having said that, you will have no trouble finding individual repeaters for $30 to $50 if you want to go cheap, and you will probably save some money if you use one of those systems.

Rich in Purcellville, Virginia and asked: “Wondering when iOS 13 is going to be out. I’ve been hearing about it for a while but so far I haven’t had the opportunity to download it. I’d like to because one of the features is improved battery life. If you have any tips on when I can get it, I’d appreciate it.”

Rich, you can download iOS 13 betas right now, though iOS beta software is very much beta software and it’s as unstable as any other beta software. If you install it, you may well end up with a camera that doesn’t work right, or you may lose WiFi under some circumstances, or who knows… it’s unstable software and tagged as such, so keep that in mind if you install it early.

If you want the stable version of iOS 13, you’ll have to wait until September. Typically, iOS is released with new iPhone versions and so far we don’t know what will be released by Apple or when, but usually new iPhones are introduced in September and their new operating system is introduced alongside them.

Tim in Burnsville, Mississippi listens on SuperTalk and asked: “I have older games, I am an older PC gamer. I’m looking for a program that will run Windows 95 and 98 games on today’s computers.”

Tim, modern Windows 10 has a built in compatibility mode that will most likely run your games.

Accessing it is relatively easy, you have to look through your hard drive and find the executable file that runs the game, right click it and go to properties. Under properties you should be able to find a Compatibility tab.