Wapsi Square Forum

Heading down to visit Kate's mom and there'll be no internet

...and it's so bad it cut off his post before he could use a period.

Have fun, AFpF; we promise not to spread any awful rumours while you're gone.

I'm having some internet troubles of my own, oddly enough: The wireless adapter in my laptop keeps disabling itself at the most inopportune moments - IF I can get the bloody thing working at all. At home, it's no big deal; I can just plug directly into the router. At work, though, it's somewhat frustrating.

I is back.

Editing pictures (new cat, etc.)

MerchManDan wrote:Have fun, AFpF; we promise not to spread any awful rumours while you're gone.

I'm having some internet troubles of my own, oddly enough: The wireless adapter in my laptop keeps disabling itself at the most inopportune moments - IF I can get the bloody thing working at all. At home, it's no big deal; I can just plug directly into the router. At work, though, it's somewhat frustrating.

that might mean that your adapter drivers got fubar'd via a software update somehow (windows is famous for doing crap like that, you update one thing and something else that shouldn't have been touched, get screwed up)... OR,that the thing is physically starting to fail... be careful if it emits its puff of magic smoke and becomes non-operational, it may take out your entire laptop in the process...

Parallel to Rawson's Third Law: Now that I've mentioned the problem & someone has responded, the adapter's working just dandy. Ah well; I'll take SMASH* to work tomorrow night & see what happens. If trouble returns, I guess that's a good indicator of borked drivers?

*That's what I named my laptop.

I would suspect the hardware first. Notebook network cards tend to be made with the cheapest chipsets the manufacturers can get away with.

shadowinthelight wrote:I would suspect the hardware first. Notebook network cards tend to be made with the cheapest chipsets the manufacturers can get away with.

same thought here.

a few more questions: how old is the machine? and does your workplace use UPC's or surge protectors that you plug into, but not at home? or vice-verse, and that makes a follow-up question. do you use it most while on battery power or line power in both places?

the power questions are to see if maybe your incoming power at home is "cleaner" that the one at work, sometimes noise on the lines can cause issues with sensitive electronic devices like computers, etc. or if your battery is possibly going bad and thus can't provide enough power to transmit via WiFi anymore, even though it's still good enough to run the "normal" PC loads like Ethernet, which uses less power.

Hmm...the laptop is just over 2 years old, and I plug it into a standard power bar at work but an actual surge protector at home. I don't use the batteries much - maybe less than a couple of hours per week.

Worth noting: While at work last night, the adapter refused to work at all; in fact, it wouldn't even appear in the Device Manager. Here at home, it connected for a minute or two and then disconnected. Once I plugged directly into my router & looked for new driver software, Device Manager insisted the drivers were up to date.

So the problem does indeed seem to be the hardware; not a huge deal, since I found my old external adapter for my older desktop. It's OK, but somewhat slower; still, I won't complain. It'll do fine, until I replace the internal one.