Now I have explained to Cyndi that rebooting her Windows laptop will fix a broken Internet, but today a reboot only gave her a strong wireless signal. Normally she complains about a weak signal so I inferred that the wireless signal strength is inversely related to the health of the Internet, although the specific causal relationship eludes me.
Realizing this theorizing was not impressing Cyndi, I began my arduous troubleshooting. My workstation found the Internet to be lively and robust as usual. My workstation is the household Internet gateway, so the first test has been passed. Still suspecting Cyndi's laptop, I tried pinging the wireless access point and got no response. Looking across the room I see the AP appears healty but the antenna was in a different configuration than when I left in the morning. Aha! My first clue.
"Cyndi, did you use the printer this afternoon?"
"Yes I did"
"Was the Internet working before you used the printer?"
"Yes it was"
"Was the Internet working after you used the printer?"
"Ummm, yes but then it broke"
When Cyndi uses the printer, she brushes the cats off her lap, picks up her laptop and shuffles across the carpet to the printer. The laptop's battery effectively doesn't work so she first plugs in her laptop before using the printer. The printer is located next to the AP. Where all the messy cables live.
Assuming a cable is loose, I check them. The cables are fine but I note only the power light is lit on the ethernet switch interconnecting much of this. Hmmm. I disconnect all the ethernet cables and try one at a time. Nothing works.
My windows pc is powered off and I decide to power it on to see if it's nic is working. Hmmm, this machine isn't working either. I run diagnostics and find the hard disk is missing. Well, is dead.
So my switch is broken and one of my pcs has a bad hard disk.
"Cyndi, where did you plug in your laptop?"
"On the power strip your computers use."
"OK. But don't do that again"
"I didn't break anything"
"Just don't do it again"
---hurt feelings follow for a few hours--
So I get a new switch and that is happy and the AP can talk to my gateway and Cyndi's laptop can talk to the Internet and she can shop on-line again and frankly that sort of sucks.
I insert a new disk into the broken pc and yep, it works. So I go to re-install Windows.
I had purchased this pc a year or so ago and while it came with Vista, I elected to "downgrade" to XP, because XP actually works. However, they only sent me the activation key for Vista, so now I have to install Vista.
Which naturally doesn't have the right drivers and Vista apparently has no natural ability to tell you what is wrong. Grubbing around and more or less guessing, I get new hardware drivers and suddenly Vista works. Only took maybe 5 or 6 hours. And then it's not really usable because the default options totally suck and finding where to change them is a blindman's adventure.
I created two partitions on my fine new TB disk and installed linux on the second. I downloaded a LiveCD from Ubuntu, burnt it to disk, rebooted the machine, answered a couple questions and poof! Linux is running. All the defaults are right. Has all the right drivers. It just works. It took me maybe 30 minutes from start (looking for a good distro) to having a useful machine running.
Too bad linux isn't consumer friendly like Windows.