Week One; Computer 1, Linda 0

For the last eight or nine days I've been fighting with my desk top PC. My hardwired satellite Internet connection has been dropping and downloading veeerrrryyyyyy ssssslllllooooowwwwlllllyyyy and many times not working at all. Yet Denny's laptop computer which is connected wirelessly to the network, works fine albeit not at the speeds we'd like. So I've been "restoring" and reloading and trying new cables and reinstalling drivers and cleaning and purging and defragging all week. To no avail. I've taken apart the tower cabinet and sucked out cat hair and dust balls and blown out more with canned air. What I managed to discover is that my Ethernet connection is not a plug and play device, but rather is soldered to the motherboard of the PC. Why I checked this is that I discovered that if I tried to plug the satellite connection directly into the PC it wouldn't work but it works plugged into the wired network router. My next decision was to connect the satellite Ethernet to the spare laptop and work off it. And since I have a separate internal wireless card in the desktop, that gave me Internet access on the big computer. But that's three computers hooked up and running for two people.

Week two; I ran a very long diagnostics program to check out everything on the computer (scary when you go into the boot program because I'm not that much of a computer geek). No problems. Sigh. This morning as I am turning on all three computers it occurred to me that since the Ethernet cable from the satellite is wired into the router maybe, just maybe, I didn't even NEED the Ethernet cable running from the router to the laptop to have all three computers operating on the wireless system. I unplugged the Ethernet cable from the spare laptop, turned the spare laptop computer off and I am currently typing this on the desk top computer which appears to be connected to the Internet and working fine. Which means that I could have saved myself umpteen hours of frustration and aggravation if I had just thought of that sooner. I had just assumed that I had to have the Ethernet leading out of the wireless router connected to a PC for the whole wireless system to work. Gah!

For now, we'll go with this. I'd like to have the Ethernet port fixed/replaced but I'm figuring that to replace an entire motherboard on a five year old computer would probably not be worth the expense. I'm going to contact Dell to see if it could be a cost effective repair, that is if they will talk to me without charging me a service fee first.

And in the meantime: week two; Computer 0, Linda 1.