Think Different

OK, I said before that I installed a new hard drive on my Dell laptop. It worked fine for a week until I undocked it, took it home, and tried to use it on my home DSL connection. Then the fucking piece of shit that it is went to hell and took me with it. *ahem* Sorry, I just had to get that out of the way. I fucking hate Windows and fucking hate the fact that Bill Gates is a billionaire for shoveling this shit to the world. *ahem* Again, I just had to get that out of the way.

When I plugged the ethernet cable into the laptop's ethernet port (and yes, I know the difference between it and the modem port), nothing happened. No connection. Nada. I checked out the network settings, and the LAN connection was reported as having no network cable connected. That's funny, what's that thick, blue cord sticking out of the side of it? Just my imagination, I'm sure.

So, I gave up and turned to my trusty Mac. Yes, I am a dyed-in-the-wool Mac user, and nothing anyone can say or do will ever change my mind.

I went to work today, redocked my laptop, and when I turned it on, I still had no network connection. OK, that's even more bizarre because I have an ethernet port on my port replicator, and the cable is always attached. In fact, the green light was on, and the amber light was flickering as a sign of some kind of activity. Now, I'm no computer genius, for sure. I know how to use a lot of applications very well, but I really don't understand how the damn thing works.

So, I rebooted. Twice. And nothing happened.

So, I called up the support guy who's doing work for us on the side (he's got a real day job) and spent the first hour of my morning with him trying to troubleshoot the motherfucking network connection. We pinged. We did the ipconfig /renew thing. We disabled that, enabled this, rebooted again, and nothing worked. We uninstalled the network adapters and let Windows 2000 Pro figure out what the things were. We removed stuff from the registry. All of this over the phone. Nothing worked. So I was out of luck all day today. No e-mail, no newsgroups, no cursed web browsing for a lazy Friday. I couldn't even print for crying out loud! I felt like I was stuck on a desert island.

Drama, drama.

Poor guy, I felt bad for bothing him on his Friday morning. We were planning to be in my office on Saturday anyway, so he said he would take a look in person to see if he could fix it. I don't get it. So I undocked the fucker and tried to use another ethernet port. What's the big deal? And so, if this is how it's going to work, does that mean I can never take the portable laptop off my desk again? How portable is that?

Whatever. I'm just ranting. I hope he can fix it, because it does work better with a fresh system on it. I still hate having to use it every day. I'd much rather install Virtual PC on my iMac and bring it into the office. At least I know the machine would work when I wanted it to.

We'll see what Easter weekend has to offer me.

I was silly enough to write this at 7:03 PM