"Configuration-Free", My Ass

[dr_tectonic]

Picked up a wireless router today for the wireless laptop Jerry bought with hooray grant money.

I was expecting to write a post about how I really ought to be less hardware-phobic, because there are so many American households that have computers now, and most of the products are designed to be used by people less tech-savvy then myself. And getting it all hooked up to talk to the desktop windows box and all that stuff was, in fact, quite painless.

But then I tried to get the laptop to talk to the wireless network.

It sees the network. It looks for the signal and is perefectly happy to connect to it and tell you the signal strength and all that kind of thing.

It just refuses to actually *use* the network in any way.

Have I mentioned recently how much I hate Windows XP? With the white-hot passion of a thousand suns, as they say; that's how much.

Comments

Apology

[(Anonymous)]

OK, I'll rewrite this. Sorry about that post. I was hungry, angry and tired. That really shouldn't have been written, and I'm sorry about what I said.

Sorry Josh.

See? This is why I don't blog. I'm a jerk when I'm hungry. :-(

KF Monkey.

Re: Apology

[toosuto.livejournal.com]

That's OK, I even heard it grumpy KF Monkey speak. If you had been anyone else I would have trolled your LJ and... oh whatever... I can't e ven mock it because I didn't think twice about it. Hope it eventually got to workin' tho' cuz I know all about the not-working technology hatin'

Re: Apology

[(Anonymous)]

Bryree came over last night and helped us fix it. It's all better now and I'm ever so happy with it. Glee!

KFM

Re: Apology

[toosuto.livejournal.com]

was it the WEP?

Re: Apology

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

It was actually two things: first, apparently the WEP passwords are case-sensitive (which really ought to be un-possible), and there was some disagreement as to what the proper case really ought to be. However, the easy fix to that is to just use a password with only digits, no letters.

Second, ZoneAlarm (software firewall) was being overly-aggressive. We uninstalled it, made the wifi go, reinstalled it, and it worked. (Using the 15-day nagware trial got it to auto-configure, and that might have been the key.)

I think that maybe the real reason it started working is that we called the Toshiba support line, and since we were trying to reproduce the bug for a tech, it went away. Now there's some guy in India who thinks I'm a total moron, but given that the computer works, I'll take it.

[toosuto.livejournal.com]

Zone alarm, while a very recommended product (from what I hear), tends to hose up alot of network connections. I spent all day on tuesday trying to get one computer to talk to the rest of the workgroup it was in and it turned out that it was the remnants of a firewall that was hosing it all up. Computers make me sad, that said, I have no idea what to be when I grow up, maybe a farmer or an astronuat, or a porn store clerk. Who knows.