What's the use of worrying now you're almost grown

[austin_dern]

My father has been doing almost all his computing work on an iPod for several years now, ever since he got an iPod pretty much, and was tired with his problems getting a Windows laptop to actually do advanced computing features like connect to the Internet. This has been pretty good for most of what he really needs a computer for --- instant messaging my sister-in-law, taking photos of his granddaughters, and checking in on FourSquare --- although there are some things he'd like to do which he can't without a stable computer base station, like, back up the information on his iPod (and iPhone, now that he has that too).

A couple weeks back my father got, from that strange and misty land of stuff friends (I guess?) were throwing out (maybe?) or something, he got a new Dell Inspiron from like eight years ago. As a computer it's not much but it would allow him to print out stuff without e-mailing it first to my mother, and to deal with web sites that aren't iPod Safari friendly and all that, so he was hoping to set it up. This then produced several frustrating phone calls in which I tried to guess how to get the network fixed over the phone, which never works, and some time in my recent surprise visit back East was spent on the same problem.

The home router insists on having a WEP password which ... yeah, I don't know what it is. There's a password that's printed on the router which I think we would all agree it would have to be, except that this doesn't work. I haven't got any idea what the WEP password should be and if any of the other Apple computers in the household know it, they won't share that information. Logging into the modem's administrative page thingy, you know, 198.164.1.1 or whatever it is, should provide the WEP password except, of course, the username/password we have written down as the access information doesn't work.

So what I'd really like to know is what's going on that my father can't get a computer that's able to connect to the Internet like every other computer in the world is able to. I'm also curious whether he puts all the networking problems on me or whether my siblings are also being pressed into the futile service here.

Trivia: On 28 May 1943 every Ford factory shut down at 2:30 pm, to observe five minutes of silence for Edsel Ford. (The boilers were kept on.) Source: Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire, Ricahrd Bak.

Currently Reading: The Chromosomal Code, Lawrence Watt-Evans. (It's dedicated to Phillip K Dick --- I suppose every post-Campbell author gets the itch to write one --- and there's flashes in which it gets that dizzying uncertain-ground conspiracy-within-conspiracy bit that makes Dick so much fun, but I suspect Watt-Evans is too fundamentally rational to be quite Dickian. On the other hand, all the story elements resolve sensibly, which your really complicated everything's-a-lie story usually has trouble managing.)

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_fluffy/]

With a mysterious router your best bet is to hold in the reset switch for 5-10 seconds until it starts blinking in some different way and then just set it up again from scratch.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Reasonable advice. Any chance of trolling the Web for a PDF of the router's manual?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Excellent chance of it. I forget which model it is, but it's one of the standard Verizon-recommended models so the instructions have to be around in abundance somewhere.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The only thing really making me nervous about resetting the router and starting from scratch is there's a lot of stuff in the house that gets on the wireless and I'm scared of fixing the Inspiron-Router problem at the cost of having to reset all the other Wi-Fi devices.

I'd like to think it'd be easier to get the network restored for the iPods and such, but that might just be a deluded hope following how irritated I am with the Inspiron.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Ooof. I know that feeling of parental tech support. My Mom has had to put a strip of tape with her wi-fi password on her router; even though it is carefully set as 'frankandsusan', where 'frank' and 'susan' are my first name and my sister's first name (not actually Frank and Susan.). Yours sounds.. even more difficult, though.

Perhaps it may, at that, be time for a new router for the old computer.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm doubtful that they do need a new router as this one's just a couple years old (from my long sarcastic conversations with Verizon, actually), and it's perfectly satisfactory for every other device in the house --- Apple laptops, iPods, iPhones, the Wii, the printer, and so on --- so it really, really looks like the Inspiron is the problem here.

What I can't get is the password issue. And, for that matter, why the WEP password even enters into things; if I'm reading my keychain right, my MacBook doesn't know and doesn't care what it is. And if bunny_hugger doesn't remember the WEP ever going into her laptop then ... you know, what is the issue here?

[sennard.livejournal.com]

No chance that the Verizon router is common enough that the Inspiron might have been in contact with one before and is convinced that you're using the same network, one which it already knows has a WEP password?

If it's still got the Dell software on it, it's likely that there are a couple of ways to set up the wireless, one through Window's Zero Config, and another through the wireless card's company utility, like a Intel Config or something along those lines. I usually turn off the company one and use the Windows setup, since the menu options are more familiar/standard.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's conceivable that the router's common enough the Inspiron dealt with the same model before. But the network name, at least, is completely different --- it's a combination of initials and the serial number of the router my parents had before this one. There's just no plausible way that whatever the Inspiron saw before was the same one.

(Well, maybe it is, if my father was mistaken or forgot about the Inspiron's origins and it's actually one he had years before that couldn't get online because they never do. It looks like an older one to me, but they do all look alike to me.)

When I get back I'll see if there's any useful-looking configuration tools around, although I have to suspect that my father would be better off if we just got him a reconditioned MacBook. Of course, knowing his luck, it'd be a laptop which won't connect to the Internet and gives Apple's lavish explanations of what's gone wrong.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

This is amateur hour, Steven.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It is!