Saturday 23 April 2011

"Communication is a problem to be answered"

and I'm sure 10cc were right, even if they didn't mean communications between computers!

Noreen bought a new laptop yesterday. Ironically enough, it was purchased because the old one had a faulty wireless adapter and had a problem somewhere in the comms software stack. Being old, it seemed like it was better value to replace it (and get all her data streamed across) than spend more money on a 4 year old machine.

Connecting it to the router was no problem (enter the "key" and that was it). Connecting to eMail was no problem either (having all the details in a "little black book" helps. And if anyone wonders, isn't black, it isn't a book, and I'm not going to tell you what it is, where it is or what else it contains!). I noticed that the wireless connection "dropped" once, but put it down to gremlins. Connecting to the existing wireless printer proved much more of a problem. The instructions say that I may have a problem with the firewall. Well, that may be so, but I disabled it for the installation. I also noticed that the wireless connection is "dropping" quite a lot.

Yesterday evening, Noreen and the girls were using the internet on the new machine. Everything works well, when it works which isn't all the time. The signal strength is reported as varying from "Good" down to "Poor". Other things (like this laptop) connected to the same router have no problems. I guess it's back to Anthony, the fellow who supplied the laptop, on Tuesday, after the break.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

And re-reading this 4 months after the event there was more to the story. Anthony checked out the machine. Everything worked properly at his locations. I contacted Eircom about the router. In the end Anthony found a that Toshiba had issued a replacement driver and not alerted people. The problem was the wireless adapter going to reduced power to save the battery. Fixed for several weeks.