The Revenge of the Repairinator!

Today was a long day. Yesterday I posted about the couple who's wireless network was being a pain and the bad wireless adapters that they had. Well, today I went with the husband to CompUSA and basically stood there as he bickered with two different managers and one or two other employees for the better part of half an hour over how he was getting ripped off. Which he was, but that is beside the point. CompUSA held their ground as I predicted and would not even give him instore credit. They switched out identical adapters with him but would not do anything more than that. I hate to say that I told them so but I knew this would be the outcome. In the end, I had him buy two Linksys PCMCIA cards that worked beautifully.

That is not to say that the day and night went off without a hitch however. The cards worked very well and the install was very fast. The Netgear USB adapters were pieces of crap that I would not suggest getting. The wierd part of the evening came when I kept getting a screen from the internet provider asking to register the laptops. This is normally no biggie, I have had this problem myself and a simple clearing of cookies, temp files, and the history from my web browser will fix the problem. Not so with these two laptops. I tried everything I could think of and then exhausted the ideas given by tech guy for the ISP. Nothing worked. The odd thing was, each laptop would have problems with different sites than the other. I could go to Google on one but if I tried to on the other, it would kick me to the ISP registration page. Somewhere in these laptops, there is a gremlin that is keeping a firm grasp to that tiny bit of DNS information that is messing the whole thing up. I am going to put Service Pack 4 on both machines and see if that fixes the problem. If that fails, I will resort to putting XP on the machines. I do not want to do this. These computers are not the newest and I quivver at the thought of running XP with 128 megs of ram. Only time will tell.

On the upside, progress is being made. At least now the computers are talking to each other and the internet (though randomly) so I don't feel too bad. I just wish this wasn't taking so much work. I feel bad for these people and I feel like it is making me look bad because of the amount of time I am devoting to these computers. I just want to keep saying, "Usually, stuff goes much smoother than this and I do know what I am doing." Fortunately, the family is very nice and understanding and most importantly, just grateful that I am helping them. The thing that bothers me is what if this was a stranger that was paying me to do this for them? This repair has just been one of those troublesome ones that people get from time to time. I just feel bad about it. But so far I am doing all of this for free though I think I am getting a Hastings gift card out of all of this. More movies!!!

On Monday, I am going back over there for hopefully the last time. Or at the worst, the second to last time. :) I am also taking in another computer to work on but I am not concerned by this one. It is a typical, format the hard drive and reinstall Windows gig. And it is on a relatively modern system. Easy.

Anywho, I have to go to work earlier than usual tomorrow so I am going to hit the sack. Nite!