No machine can give the kind of stimulation

[austin_dern]

This is an incident that doesn't take much background to appreciate, but I have the background so I'm going to apply it. After my sister's wedding and our return back home my mother wanted to check her e-mail, and was a little put out that the wireless network at home wasn't working. She was particularly annoyed by this because my Mac was running just fine, and even more obnoxiously my father's Dell laptop had no problems either. The usual approaches accomplished nothing except for getting the wireless modem rebooted more than usual and getting her computer rebooted more than usual.

My mother gave her laptop to me to fix, since while I don't know anything about usefully fixing Windows problems my brother refuses to look at her computer anymore until she's had me try it. As best as I could tell the wireless routing options were all turned on and everything was ready to receive bits from out of the ether, it just wasn't. What it looked like to me was that whatever Windows for ``Turn AirPort Off'' had been selected, but of course there wasn't anything that looked like ``Turn AirPort On'' to be found. After a day or so of this I gave up and admitted this.

So when my mother talked to my brother on the phone I heard a lot of her going to menus that she and I had gone to and confirming that settings looked ready to receive signals but just weren't. Finally he got tired of my mother not seeing the problem and got me on the phone, where I was able to confirm that settings looked ready to receive signals but just weren't. What we ultimately resorted to was a web service that seems equivalent to Remote Desktop, and we were able to watch as he repeated all the menus he told us to look at and saw no difference from what we saw. Eventually he got to running a full hardware diagnostic, which we hadn't done before, and he found something.

To everyone's surprise there's a little switch on the side of my mother's laptop which governs whether it will look for wireless signals. She'd never known about it. I'd never known about it. None of the help files besides wireless settings bothered to mention it. But, yes, it had been turned off, and once the physical switch was turned 'on' all was back to normal, and we were left wondering what is with this stupid switch, anyway.

Trivia: In 1922 United States manufacturers produced a bit more than 100,000 radios. Source: Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920-1941, Michael E Parrish.

Currently Reading: Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists, Stephen Bach.

Comments

[skylerbunny.livejournal.com]

To everyone's surprise there's a little switch on the side of my mother's laptop which governs whether it will look for wireless signals...we were left wondering what is with this stupid switch, anyway.

Is this a relatively new laptop? That sounds like the sort of thing included with newer laptops and phones to make it "easy" to turn off wireless for situations like when you get on a plane. Never mind that such things are completely useless if they're not documented...

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The laptop's a couple years old. I think it dates to 2006, actually. It may have been mentioned in the original documentation, although two years after purchase who could find such a thing anymore?

I still say it's easiest to turn off something like that by, oh, an option on the 'Internet connection' panel that says 'turn off wireless'.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

BunnyHugger gives the switch a Stern Look.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm happy to pass that along to the laptop, which has admittedly been behaving better now that the switch is where it should have been all along.

My mother's wondered how she could have had the laptop all this time and never accidentally thrown the switch before.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

My Playstation Portable has a switch like that, but it's very clearly marked on the face. In fact, the PSP only has two switches; everything else is a button.

I'm surprised, but not too, that the switch as never noted. I'm still finding out features of my cell phone that I've owned for two and a half years[*1].

--Chiaroscuro
[*1] Well, given that I broke the screen, and bought a replacement, identical phone- it's not the SAME phone, but it's an identical twin, minus the scar.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I must admit there are utilities and components of my PowerBook that I haven't actually made use of yet, but in that case its mostly because I haven't had anything behaving mischievously enough that I need to fiddle with things I haven't already fiddled with before.