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Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Ups and downs

Tuesday turned out to be a day of ups and downs.  On the upside, went to my first band practice in over a decade and it went rather well.  I'm a bit rusty and having trouble remembering how certain limbs move at certain times but overall it was fun.  I need to do some studying before gig day but I think it will be a good show.

On the downside yesterday, the wi-fi on the wife's laptop crapped out a day after I finally got it working right!  It wasn't long after we got the thing that the internal wireless just wouldn't connect.  It would see networks but never be able to connect.  I pulled the card, checked the antenna connections but still nothing.  I checked the drivers and such but nothing seemed out of place.  We had a USB Wi-Fi adapter sitting around so she just used that until that got damaged.  So I ordered a new half-card, mini-card wireless adapter for five bucks and dropped that it.  What happened?  Perfectly connected up, no problems, top transfer speeds across the board.

That worked great for an entire day!  I came home last night, picked it up and connected to a minecraft server and played for an hour.  No issues whatsoever.  I put the thing down to eat some toast and watch some IT Crowd and when I picked it back up the card was gone.  

Yup...the card was no longer listed in the device manager.  Poof....gone.  I popped the back off just to make sure it hadn't been stolen by pixies but it was still there physically.  Odd, I thought, it's still there!  I restarted and now the computer is trying to tell me I have a unrecognizable USB device attached to the computer.  What the heck?  Somehow, in the span of making toast, the system decided that the wireless card wasn't a wireless card but rather a mutant USB device.  I am a titch angry.  If I can install it manually rather than relying on the plug-and-play awesomeness that is modern computing maybe that will clear it up.  It's a fix I will try tonight.  

Sadly though I fear it's a bad port and never repairable.  I guess it's back to USB adapters.  So sad.  

At least Bioshock: Infinite downloaded the day it was working. ;)

2 comments:

Froyd said...

I HATE when device drivers are auto-loaded, it's such a damn mess trying to uninstall the shitty driver and reinstall the good ones because it'll automagically (not a typo) look at the install that is fuxxored rather than the good one.

Also, how goes Bioshock Infinite? I want that game so hard.

Ventola said...

This is the first time I've had real problems with the auto-install. It's wicked annoying though, I'll give you that. The silly thing is I need to get online to get the driver pack but it's the wifi card that's out so I can't go online...time to dig out a cable and jack into the router...so primitive.

Beth purchased the Bioshock so she gets first dibs...I'll let you know in a few weeks when I get my hands on it.