Happy to Be Wired Again

Last Saturday, I attempted to install an old scanner (and by old, I mean almost as old as David). I should have known better, but I did anyway, assuming it would be OK, and if not, no big. Well, XP crashed during install, but the scanner worked OK so I thought all was good.

A *short* time later, XP was complainng about not being connected to the wireless router. To make a long story short, it broke something in XP; drivers, dll's, who knows. But after nearly a day of trying to fix, I called AT&T for help, along with calling/[estering my friend Tim. I even used the pay-for-services route, as I didn't want to rebuild XP. Well, there was too much afoul, and the tech could not help, but he did a decent job trying, so I ndo not begrudge the small fee.

So I rebuilt, and you would think I knew what I was doing. Initially I had trouble with the XP boot disk, as there is a very short window to press a key for setup, and Blindie didn't see it too well. So formatted c:, installed XP, then SPs 2/3. There were some broken items, but I had the original Dell Drivers CD, so putting most of those on was no big deal.

Once done with this, I plugged in the 2Wire wireless adapter, set the Windows Zero thing on, and it seemed to easily connect to the adapter and I had a good signal strength, but I couldn't get anything in Firefox to show up.

Well, back to AT&T free basic support, and I got lucky. I got one of the most patient, knowledgable, and pleasant base-level techies I have ever talked to. Despite me messig something up with a blindie mistake, and having him take me through the process again, in half an hour, I was good to go and connected.

Major lesson learned here: do NOT hit the reset on your router - it resets the PW to factory defaults. Bad idea. In my desperation to connect earlier, I had reset it in hopes that that was the reason it wasn't connectiung. If I want to 'reset' the router, apparently, just unplug for 30 seconds and power back up.

So thanks to the AT&T tech from last night, and Tim for bearing with me. I was surprised by how much it bugged me not to be able to connect from home, so the kids could look stuff up for homework, and personal stuff I do. Ah, life is a smidge better today.........