Incremental improvements, exponential time wasted
Yesterday I got some wireless networking equipment through the post (yes, on a Sunday… now that’s service!). Very exciting, but it’s ended up being a little time consuming…
Step 1: Reinstall an old network card in my main PC. Estimated time – 10 minutes. Actual time – 2 hours, including a Sunday afternoon drive to go and get a replacement card when I realise the old one isn’t working because it’s not set-up correctly, but actually isn’t working because it’s broken.
Step 2: Install spangly new ADSL router firewall wireless access point thingy. Proceeds without a hitch, works like a charm and looks beautiful (to a geek that is). Then spend about an hour fiddling with settings that I don’t even need to look at, just because I can.
Step 3: Install wireless card in Amy’s PC. Again without a hitch, even managed to get the internet connection going without having much of a clue as to how it was meant to work.
Step 4: Install wireless card in laptop. Estimated time – 10 minutes. Actual time – the rest of Sunday and Monday morning. Really ran the gamut of problems with this one. Tried different drivers, plugging and unplugging repeatedly, resetting a lot (in fact this took most time of all, the old laptop take soooooo long to reboot). Eventually found a conflict that windows had decided not to tell me about and then had a productive 5 minutes actually fixing the problem. Sadly the problems didn’t end there, despite being able to ping the network I couldn’t actually get the internet connection working, nor windows file sharing with other PCs. Spent a couple of hours tinkering and managed to sort the former (yes, I can now blog from bed!), but the latter is still waiting for another day… time to look up some of those wireless networking books at work.
Step 5: Realise how hopelessly bourgeois this all sounds.
Now I really feel like my new technology has cost me double – the hours I worked to get the money to buy the kit, plus the hours it’s taken me to get it (almost) all working. Still, fiddling with computers is kind of fun. And blogging from the sofa is lovely.
-
If you’ve read that you’re probably thinking that my new kit has now also cost you the time it took to read that, but it’s what I spent my time doing so I’m going to bleeding well write about it. Maybe you can find your own moral from the story?
Step 1: Reinstall an old network card in my main PC. Estimated time – 10 minutes. Actual time – 2 hours, including a Sunday afternoon drive to go and get a replacement card when I realise the old one isn’t working because it’s not set-up correctly, but actually isn’t working because it’s broken.
Step 2: Install spangly new ADSL router firewall wireless access point thingy. Proceeds without a hitch, works like a charm and looks beautiful (to a geek that is). Then spend about an hour fiddling with settings that I don’t even need to look at, just because I can.
Step 3: Install wireless card in Amy’s PC. Again without a hitch, even managed to get the internet connection going without having much of a clue as to how it was meant to work.
Step 4: Install wireless card in laptop. Estimated time – 10 minutes. Actual time – the rest of Sunday and Monday morning. Really ran the gamut of problems with this one. Tried different drivers, plugging and unplugging repeatedly, resetting a lot (in fact this took most time of all, the old laptop take soooooo long to reboot). Eventually found a conflict that windows had decided not to tell me about and then had a productive 5 minutes actually fixing the problem. Sadly the problems didn’t end there, despite being able to ping the network I couldn’t actually get the internet connection working, nor windows file sharing with other PCs. Spent a couple of hours tinkering and managed to sort the former (yes, I can now blog from bed!), but the latter is still waiting for another day… time to look up some of those wireless networking books at work.
Step 5: Realise how hopelessly bourgeois this all sounds.
Now I really feel like my new technology has cost me double – the hours I worked to get the money to buy the kit, plus the hours it’s taken me to get it (almost) all working. Still, fiddling with computers is kind of fun. And blogging from the sofa is lovely.
-
If you’ve read that you’re probably thinking that my new kit has now also cost you the time it took to read that, but it’s what I spent my time doing so I’m going to bleeding well write about it. Maybe you can find your own moral from the story?
posted by paul at 7:45 pm
1 Comments:
The next step is to see if you can get an Xbox on your wireless network...
Post a Comment
<< Home