Talk About Unexpected Upgrades

On Tuesday morning as I was running through my emails and feeds I lost connectivity with the internets…Not the way I wanted to start a day. After going to the equipment cabinet in the bedroom closet and trying the unplug all, replug all, hit reset, try three times…I called AT&T. After walking throgh all of the steps with the dsl tech on the phone, she agreed, the modem had died. Hold on while she checks to see if they have a new one in the warehouse…It’ll be here Wednesday afternoon.

At that point I have a really odd feeling. I am disconected for the next 24+ hours. No email, no feeds, no blogs, no streming Netflix, no Hulu…What will I do with myself…So I poured another cup of coffee, grabbed the hummingbird book I bought last week (Hummingbirds of Texas: with Their New Mexico and Arizona Ranges (Atm Nature Guides)). I read the whole thing as the humminbirds buzzed around me…And I still can’t tell if I have anything besides Ruby Throats.

Once that was done it was time to spend some time in the yard…Watering, weeding, puttering around in the 90° weather. Repeat on Wednesday right up until the UPS truck showed up with the new modem. Oh goody…they are replacingh the 2 Wire with a Netgear… Lovely.

A DSL Modem (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Then the fun began…Plug everything in. Run the setup. Then setup wifi…Try again…Use the install disk that comes in the modem package…The modem isn’t listed in the ones the software is degined to install…Great. It’s late, we need wifi and I saw something in Windows 7 about setting your computer up as a shared hotspot, so off we go…It works. Not great, but, it works. The daughter can get internet from the dining room the kids can watch Netflix on the living room TV. For the night it works.

Today, I fiddled around untilI finally just changed the password in the wifi setup from the default…Guess what it worked. Then it was on to setting upo the printer… I just love how everything is so interconected that when one thing goes down it’s a two day chore to get everything running again… So after upgrading the computers last week, I had to upgrade the network this week…September, the month of upgrades.

Now, to get back to my uneventful life…

shoreacres says:

September 27, 2012 at 6:49 pm

It’s getting time for me to try and expand my tech horizons. Maybe this winter. If I understand things, I can get a router and use my laptop via wifi right here at home. I guess I’d have to figure out how to keep other folks out, too. When I fire the laptop up there are about 35 wifi signals around me. Apartment living! All are locked, of course. I need my own.

I have a USB modem I’ve used with the laptop while traveling, but I suspended it because of cost. If I need to evacuate or head off to the hinterlands, I can just reactivate it.

I had my own little crisis this morning. I got up, logged on and discovered the gremlins had been busy overnight. My icons were huge, nothing looked “right”, and some programs, like Freecell, just didn’t work. I got a nice note from the machine saying my Nvidia was disconnected or something. I fussed for a while, downloaded an updated driver and still had a problem.

I went off to work, and at lunch I finally thought, “Ah, ha! Try the device manager!” Which I did. I found the graphics card, opened up one of the files and discovered it had been deactivated. There was a nice button to click to reactivate it, which I did. And now, all is well is cyberland. Whoohooo!

Gary Boyd says:

September 28, 2012 at 8:49 am

My new computer came with Adobe Premier Elements to edit videos. So this morning I went out and took some short video clips of the hummingbirds at their feeders. Loaded them all into Premier and was amazed as it started warning me it was running out of working memory. Eventually it worked….See the video here

When I was having so much trouble getting wifi up and running I jumped the gun and went to Amazon to order a wifi router in case I couldn’t get the wifi on the modem to work. I didn’t want to lissten to all of the complaining all weekend if I failed to get everything running. So now I’ll have an extra wifi hotspot to extend our range around here.

Oh, well. Glad you were able to fix your problem. I was having video problems with my old laptop for a while. Every once and a while it would change resolution on it’s own and I could not change it back until after a reboot…It left me scratching my head.

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